Looking for sofware to display keystrokes as they are typed, for demos

[Tom Buskey]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 8:35 AM, Benjamin Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 7:54 AM, Ted Roche <tedroche at tedroche.com> wrote:
> > It would be really helpful if there could be a pop-up or
> > persistent window that would display a ring buffer of the last 4 seconds
> > of keystrokes, in a large font, so it would be apparent which keystrokes
> > I was hitting.
>
>   There's an X protocol analyzer called "xmon" which I've never used,
> but I was wondering if it might do the job.
>
>  I can't find it, but while searching for it, I came across a
> reference to "xkey", which is an X keystroke monitor.  Source:
>
> http://www.deter.com/unix/
>
>  If it worked, an xterm with a smaller-than-usual window size and a
> large font would do the trick.
>
>  It seemed to work for some X clients.  But it's got problems:
>
>  (1) When it's running, Firefox won't accept keyboard input.  I don't
> know if this is an accident, or some kind of defense mechanism against
> sniffing built-in to Firefox.
>
>  (2) Several other X clients accept key input, but xkey doesn't show it.
>
>  (3) It doesn't seem to display [Delete] key presses.
>
>  "xev" does show raw X events when I type in Firefox
> ("PropertyNotify"), so *something* is there for the sniffing.
>
>  I know this doesn't help you, but I'm hoping it might supply a
> catalyst to a successful effort.
>
>
I've used something called xscope.  It's an X11 proxy that shows everything
going between the client and server.  It's part of Solaris and most
Linuxen.  It's kind of like Wireshark for X.

You might be able to filter out keystrokes with it.

I used it to debug differences from Solaris x86 and Solaris SPARC to an
HP-UX server once.  x86 is Xorg, Sparc is Xsun and different X extensions
are supported.
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