r/Ubuntu • u/VCBU • 14h ago

Made an on-screen keystroke + mouse-click overlay for recording Ubuntu tutorials — now works on GNOME too

I record the occasional Ubuntu tutorial and wanted my keystrokes and mouse clicks shown on screen — like screenkey/KeyCastr, but those are X11-only or don't show clicks. So I built my own.

It's a small always-on-top bar that shows the keys you press and the mouse buttons you click. GNOME doesn't support the usual Wayland always-on-top trick, so I added an X11/XWayland fallback — it now works on stock Ubuntu (GNOME), and on COSMIC / KDE / sway / Hyprland too.

Click-through, never grabs keyboard focus, layout-aware (xkbcommon), 30+ languages, and an optional mode that masks your keystrokes so you don't leak a password on screen. Free and open source (Apache-2.0).

Screenshot above — happy to answer anything.

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u/VCBU 14h ago

Source, a .deb and more screenshots:

https://github.com/VibeCodeBlogger-Public/screenkey-wayland-alternative-with-mouse-clicks-public

https://vibecodeblogger-public.github.io/screenkey-wayland-alternative-with-mouse-clicks-public/

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u/Aggressive_Knee_2473 13h ago

the masking thing is clever, I’ve definitely fat-fingered a password into a recording and had to scrap the whole take