KeyScreen — Show Key Presses on Screen

https://keyscreenapp.com/

Why This Matters

If you have ever recorded a Claude Code session or a terminal demo and rewatched the cut wondering "wait, what did I just type", you have already met the problem. Screen recordings show what changed; they don't show what you pressed to make it change. The audience can see git commit happen but can't see your Ctrl-R reverse-search dance.
KeyScreen is the on-screen-keystrokes overlay that makes screencasts followable. Version 2.2.0 just hit Homebrew cask. macOS 15+. One-time purchase, no subscription.

What It Actually Does

  • Visual keystroke overlay. Shows every keypress — including modifier chords (⌘, ⌥, ⌃, ⇧), function keys, arrows.
  • Customization. Font, color, size, position, animation are all tunable. Five built-in themes plus custom theme authoring.
  • Smart combo display. Renders chord combinations as a unit (⌘⇧P) rather than as a flickering sequence.
  • Multi-display. Choose which monitor the overlay lives on — useful when you record one display and present from another.
  • Local-only. Processing stays on-device. No telemetry of keystrokes, which is the right posture for an app that by definition sees every keypress.

Where It Fits in Our Workflow

Two natural homes:
  1. /up-and-running content in this same content/lost-in-public/ directory. Those guides are screenshot-heavy; the few that include short screencasts (e.g., terminal walkthroughs) would benefit from KeyScreen overlays so readers can replicate the steps.
  2. Deck-iteration demos. Under deck iteration workflow we sometimes embed short screen-recordings into fundraise decks — a 30-second clip showing a Claude Code session, a chroma MCP query, or a multi-step keyboard-driven flow. KeyScreen turns those clips from "trust me, I pressed something" into "follow along."
Compare against Keycastr (free, open-source, more minimalist) and Presentify (overlap on the "live overlay on demos" category, but Presentify is cursor/annotation-focused, not keystrokes). KeyScreen is the polished, paid, keystroke-specific choice; Keycastr is the free baseline. Both have a place.

Install

bash 
brew install --cask keyscreen
Source: https://keyscreenapp.com/