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2021-11-22 - tmux keylogger

here is a shameless self promotion about a little script i made a few weeks ago. that script is called "tmux key log" or "tkl". just run "tkl" and you can have a little key logger running in your tmux status bar. this is super nice if you give presentations through the terminal, which is why i made it.

before i began work on this script, i saw one tmux keylogger script, but i think the developer was really just trying to see if it could be implemented in bash instead of creating something super useful. anyways, here is that project:

tmux keylogger implementation in bash

i wrote my script in python using the "keyboard" library, which you can find here:

keyboard library

i made sure it worked on both arch linux and darwin. i actually found 2 bugs in the keyboard library for darwin, so i fixed those bugs in some prs:

added linux feature to darwin

darwin fix for dvorak layout

some nice features of this little script:

unicode is used to represent some keystrokes (eg: arrow keys are ←↑→↓)
there is only 1 python dependency and the script is only 1 file
ctrl, alt/option, super/cmd, and shift are all supported
everything is saved in memory, instead of to a file
only the last 40-ish keystrokes are saved in memory

here is an asciinema recording so you can see it for yourself:

tkl demo

and finally, here is that script you must be super excited about now:

tkl code