Every wondered how to display keystrokes for screencasts on windows? If you have ever watched a video tutorial, then you probably know it is sometimes helpful to display what the instructor is typing, especially things like  CSS, HTML or other custom code, on the screen.

In this post I rank (from best to worst) all of the applications I was able to locate.

(1) QiPress 1.056

My favorite app is QiPress which works with Windows XP/Vista/7/8. It displays all keystokes and mouse movements on the screen. The old entry disappears and a new one appears once you click on the space key. I like this product because the interface is clean and because it easily customizable. There are two versions available, Lite and Pro. The pro version costs 11.99 and comes with several added features including:

• Customizable background image and text font, rounded corners, customizable date-time display, customizable volume bar
• Multi-monitor support, with precision-positioning controls
• Display A-Z keystrokes in true case, extended keys (ä, é, õ, û, ©, µ and more)
• German, French, Hindi and Gujarati keyboards and input methods supported

(2) KeyCastOW 2.0.0.2

Updated in late August 2014, KeyCastOW includes some of the features provided with QiPress Lite. One cool feature of KeyCastOW that I did not see in QiPress is that it pushes old entries up the screen as and slowly fades them out as you type new keys. At 100kb it has an extremely small footprint. There is only a free version available.

(3) Key Displayer v 3

Key Displayer is a commercial product designed in August 2011 for Windows 7. It has a sleek interface that resembles QiPress Lite. There is not a free or shareware version of Key Displayer available for me to test which is part of the reason I have it listed in the number three position. The other reason it is listed as number three is because as of September 2014, development and support for KeyDisplayer has stopped and Windows 8 support is not guaranteed.

(4) osdHotkey v 1.6 beta

Released in March 2007, osdHotkey also shows your keyboard strokes and mouse clicks in on the screen in real time. It worked on my Windows 8 machine without any issues. osdHotKey does not look as sleek and elegant as QiPress Lite. Frankly, it looks quite ulgy. Strings of text are separated with an underscore and you have the text showing up a Windows 95 style window. You can change the dimensions of the window, but that does not impact how much text is able to be shown. Also although you can change the background color of the window and set the transparency level,  you can not set it to slowly fade out.

(5) KeyPose

The version of the KeyPose that I tested was released in August 2008. The shortcoming of this application is that it only displays one key on the screen at a time. So if you type a string it doesn’t display the whole string.

(6) Show Off v1.2

The version of Show Off that I tested was updated in 2005. That being said, it has been successfully used in 2013, and worked find on my Windows 8 workstation. Like KeyPose, Show Off displays each keystroke individually on the screen. The window that the keystrokes shows up in can be moved. To change any settings you need to edit the ini file.

(7)  Keyboard Jedi

Keyboard Jedi was last updated in 2008. The version released by the original developer does does not play nice with 64 bit machines. Sometime between September 2008 and 2010 some fans of the application created a version that is compatible with 64 bit machines. This app only shows combination shortcuts (alt-ctrl-shift+ key). not stand alone key presses (e.g. q,w,e,r,t,y), Keyboard Jedi is the most limited of option presented here. Hence, it is the worse for my purposes.

Honorable Mention

Keyboard Status Monitor (key-mon) & pykeyview: Using any of these two tools requires working knowledge of python. Click on the links to learn more.

Is that all?

Are there other apps that are not listed here that should be? Let us know by mentioning them in the comments area.