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If you create software training then odds are you show a lot of keyboard shortcuts. If that’s the case you’ll like today’s tip where I share a simple tool that makes it really easy to display the keyboard shortcuts on-screen.

How to Display Keyboard Shortcuts during Screencast Tutorials

Meet Carnac the Magnificent. It’s a keyboard utility that displays keyboard shortcuts as they are used during your demos. This is perfect for webinars and screencast tutorials. It’s also great for live presentations where people in the back of the room can’t always hear or see what’s going on.

Here’s a quick tutorial where I show how it works and how it would look in your software training.

Click here to view the Youtube video.

  • You can download Carnac here. Read more about it here.
  • Once you download the file, double-click to install it.
  • You’ll see the purple Carnac icon in your system tray.

Once it’s active in your system tray and you use a keyboard shortcut, you’ll see the shortcut displayed on the screen as in the image below.

screencast tutorials example

How to Customize the Keyboard Shortcut Display for Screencast Tutorials

You can modify how the keyboard shortcuts display.

  • Double-click on the Carnac icon and it opens a setting window.
  • You’ll see the option to select monitors and where the object is displayed. You start by selecting the screen and then adjust how much you want to offset it.

screencast tutorials set properties

  • You can also change the appearance of what’s displayed. This includes the width, font size, and color. I couldn’t get the sliders to work, but manually entering the values did work for me. Save your changes.

screencast tutorials change appearance

It’s a fairly easy to use and it’s free. But you get what you pay for, so if you need help, you’re stuck. But I’ve found it works fine and as expected.  If you need a way to display keyboard shortcuts, then this solution should work for you.

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5 responses to “Here’s a Free Application to Help with Tutorials & Screencast Videos”

This is great, Tom! Too bad my month of daily screencasting is done…I’ll definitely use this in the future though 🙂

I really like the tool, however I am a bit leery about a website that has a download button that goes right to an install procedure. There is no opportunity to virus scan the file before it goes to an install.

March 6th, 2017

@Sean: yes that is one of the aspects of getting what you pay for. 🙂

Does it show mouse clicks (left, right, and middle) as well?

March 20th, 2017

@Jody: it only tracks keyboard input and not mouse clicks.