smtk-tui

A terminal-based screenkey — display your keystrokes and mouse clicks live in the terminal.

For streamers, tutorial creators, and anyone who wants their viewers to see what keys they're pressing.

How It Works

This project is a TUI frontend for showmethekey. It reuses the CLI backend (showmethekey-cli) to read input events from /dev/input/ via libinput, then displays them in the terminal using ratatui.

• No GUI required — runs in any terminal emulator
• Protocol-independent — works on both X11 and Wayland via libinput/evdev
• Lightweight — single binary, minimal dependencies

Hardware → /dev/input/event* → showmethekey-cli (JSON) → smtk-tui (ratatui)

Requirements

• Linux
• showmethekey-cli installed (provides the input-reading backend)
• A terminal emulator with Unicode support

If your user is in the input group, smtk-tui runs the CLI directly.
Otherwise it uses pkexec for privilege escalation.

Installation

cargo install --git https://github.com/ToaaMusic/smtk-tui

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/ToaaMusic/smtk-tui
cd smtk-tui
cargo build --release

Usage

smtk-tui

Press keys or click mouse buttons — they will appear in the terminal.
Press q or Esc to quit.

Display Format

Ctrl+C
Shift+Alt+T
↵

Keys are shown one per line, newest first. Modifier keys (Ctrl, Shift, Alt, Super) are automatically combined with the key they modify.

Idle for 2 seconds and the display clears automatically.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 — the same license as showmethekey, since it reuses the CLI backend.