Smaller Key-Status Monitor
April 6th, 2009 by heathenxSometime ago Richard and I started using Daniel Taylor’s Key-Status Monitor as a visual aid to our Inkscape screencasts. I remember first seeing this used by Rolf Steinort from Meet The Gimp. At the time I remember thinking it looked rather neat and just figured that it was part of Gnome or Ubuntu or something. After some time had passed I got interested in it for my own screencasts and contacted Rolf to get the scoop on it. He helped me get it working on my box, I relayed that information to Richard and from that point it just became part of our screencasts. We use it often now, except for the period where we couldn’t get it working for most of the Ubuntu 8.10 time frame due to a bug. However, with a little help from Peter Carrero, we got the Key-Status Monitor working again. It’s my understanding that the issues we had with it not working have been fixed in Ubuntu 9.04.
I have always been appreciative of Daniel’s program. However, lately I have been feeling like it’s a little too big in dimensional size for my specific needs. Actually, that has always been a problem but I have just dealt with it. In some cases I opted not to use it at all because I couldn’t find a suitable place for it on top of my small Inkscape window (my screencast window size is 912×684). So…I decided to make a smaller version for myself.
The first thing I tried was just scaling the PNG icons from the original 48px high to 32px high. It worked but the text on the keys were no longer legible. Fortunately for me, Daniel supplied the SVG icons with the application (which I think Jakub Steiner had a hand in) so I altered all of the icons so that the text would be legible again. I combined that with a tip that Garrett LaSage gave me last week regarding the use of Devil’s Pie to turn off the the windows decorations and voila!…a smaller Key-Status Monitor was born.
There might be a few more tweaks necessary but overall I’m quite satisfied with this smaller version, especially without the window decoration showing. An Alt+LMB easily moves it around and I can easily stop it from running via the terminal.
Below is a screenshot comparison of it all. 
Update: Until I hear from Daniel regarding his interest in this smaller version, I will offer it up here for download.
April 6th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Great !!
It will be great if there a release of this
Best regards from france.
April 8th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
I second that, I would love to see this tool released. It would come handy to show my students what I am actually doing.
And I thank you for this show, which I’ve just discovered. Inkscape is a great tool, and it deserves to be better known.
Greetings from france (as well
)
April 8th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
I updated the post with a download link for those who wish to try it out. Enjoy.
April 12th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Thanks !
The executable file don’t work for me. So I used the original file instead. Even the result seems to be a little different.
April 30th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Looks really better! But the US keyboard is still hard coded into it. CTRL-Z results in CTRL-Y, [ in SHIFT-8 and so on. So it is still not usable for me.
April 30th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
@Rolf
There are keyboard layouts other than US? Weird.
April 30th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
@heathenx: Even more strange is the fact, that these keyboard layouts are used outside of the area where the World Series is being played.
Most strange: The author of this tool is from Germany…..
May 16th, 2009 at 1:57 am
It’d be nice if you included a README.txt file… this was also missing from Daniel’s original… I’m glad you mentioned a problem with Ubuntu 8.10 as you likely saved me some heartache trying to get this to work – although the workaround would have also been nice.
Great Job on all the screencasts – especially some of the latter ones where the entire screencast is sped-up and shown during the first minute intro.
It’d also nice you mentioned a lot of the tools your using for screencasts. But it’d be awesome if you also mentioned some of the encoding settings you guys are using.
keep up the good work!
October 3rd, 2009 at 8:25 pm
is it possible to get a version or similar program for windows? or would it be possible to run this on windows?
October 4th, 2009 at 7:34 am
@windoze_user
I have seen keyboard status monitors for Windows. Google it and something will turn up.
November 24th, 2009 at 11:05 am
I’ve made my own version of this program over the weekend such that you can scale it to any size!
Instead of using a bunch of png files, instead I load and combine only the SVG source on the fly. I have only 18 svg files that I combine to make different keys or mouse images.
I also added support for the scroll wheel and for the Meta (aka Windows) key.
The code is open source and hosted on code.google.com.
Take a look http://code.google.com/p/key-mon/
March 31st, 2011 at 3:21 pm
Hey Scott: your version IS AMAZING!!!!
THANKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!