Enhance your Screencasts with key-mon on Fedora

Have you ever been doing a screencast, (or watched a screencast), where most of the video is the screencaster explaining what mouse and keyboard buttons they are pressing at a particular time?

This is where key-mon (short for keyboard status monitor) comes into its own — it shows exactly what keyboard and mouse buttons are being pressed when you press them. No more explaining specific key combos over and over again!

keymon

Before doing a screencast, you just fire up keymon, and be sure it is visible in your screencasting area, and it will show whatever you press. Pretty nifty!

To install key-mon on Fedora, just search for it in the Software application, or on the command line, run the command sudo yum install key-mon.

Fedora Project community

7 Comments

  1. I’m found of screenkey as I think it’s quite a bit more astheticly pleasings than keymon. Wasn’t hard to build an RPM for my F20 installations.

    • ooh, hadnt tried screenkey yet! might try to get it into fedora too (i packaged up key-mon a few months ago)

    • eMBee

      screenkey doesn’t seem to support showing mouse-clicks though. it also doesn’t show how long a key is held. and it’s no longer maintained. but might be fixable…

      greetings, eMBee.

  2. looks good i will try, jhon where the screenkey rpm ? some place to donwload?

  3. Thank you for packaging key-mon. I’ll definitely be using this in my screencasts.

    QUESTION: The quality of your animated gif screencast is quite good for just 367 kB. What is your workflow for creating such a screencast?

    • The workflow is a bit convoluted, but it works with most gifs:

      1. take the screencast with the gnome shell screencasting feature (results in a webm)
      2. convert the webm to a sequence of images with this gstreamer command:

      gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location="input.webm" ! decodebin ! videoconvert ! pngenc ! multifilesink location="pngs/%04d.png"

      3. convert the pngs to a gif with this imagemagick command:

      convert *.png animation.gif

      4. crunch the gif with:

      convert animation.gif -fuzz 5% -layers Optimize animation-optimized.gif

      This step is a bit of trial and error. you mess with the fuzz % value to get a gif that is a good size yet looks ok.

      5. If you want to crunch it even more, you can convert your animation to an indexed gif (specifying the number of colours — i chose 64 in this example)

      convert animation-optimized.gif  -dither FloydSteinberg -colors 64  animation-optimized-indexed.gif

      Its all about trial and error to see which looks the best (yet keeping the size as small as possible 🙂 )

      hope this helps…

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