Dear Programmer,
can you please write me a little program that displays keystrokes on the screen? In a window that stays always on top, has no borders and sits silently in a corner of my recording area? And everytime I press a key it displays the pressed key(s), like “SHIFT-CTRL-A”, for a second or so?
I forget so often to tell the people the keys I press and they complain in e-mails.
Your reward will be FAME in the show credits and on the website. And of course 10% of the money the show earns after taxes. 
Thank You!
Rolf
PS: System: Ubuntu 7.10 plain vanilla, X11 with driver “nvidia”, and I know how to compile stuff.
I’d like to point you to Key Status Monitor at:
http://programmer-art.org/projects/keystatus
And an other nice Tool for desktop videos is gromit:
http://www.home.unix-ag.org/simon/gromit/
Thanks!
If this works like advertised – WHOW!
Looks like gromit is in the Ubuntu repositories…
I’ll give it a try. Question is: Does it work with the screen recorder? Both mess with the X system……
Key Status Monitor and Gromit work with the screen recorder. Problem solved!
Glad the key status monitor script is working for you. Just wanted to note that compiz (the “desktop effects” stuff) has a plugin to do annotations on the screen as well. You can enable it if you install compizconfig-settings-manager in Ubuntu. Here is a video of it http://youtube.com/watch?v=urA6foIO4WM&feature=related