Comment by ziotom78 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ziotom78 | Hacker News Reader

I often create screen recordings for my classes, but it's very boring and time consuming. I'm a perfectionist, and if I mistype a command I prefer to re-record everything. Moreover, every time one of the tools used in the videos gets a significant update, I feel compelled to redo the video.

I have started using xdotool [1] to create bash scripts that send mouse clicks and keystrokes to apps. Interleaving calls to xdotool with the "sleep" command [2] produce a convincing effect. If I need to redo a video to fix typos or after a program update, I just fix the bash script and restart the recording.

Alas, the only thing that is missing in my videos is the sound of keyboard clicks… But nothing is perfect!

[1] https://github.com/jordansissel/xdotool

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_(command)

We used something similar in 2008 at CeBIT (which was the biggest IT trade show in Germany at the time). A publishing house for IT magazines set up a side area for minibooths and gave them out to a dozen open-source projects. I was there with a bunch others to represent KDE. We only had a few posters and stickers, nothing fancy, so we had to make our booth flashy somehow. My friend quickly hacked together something with a similar input simulation tool that opened applications from the start menu, flipped through directories in Dolphin, and such, and set it up to run in a loop. It sure did help us catch people's attention.

> I have started using xdotool [1] to create bash scripts that send mouse clicks and keystrokes to apps. Interleaving calls to xdotool with the "sleep" command [2] produce a convincing effect.

Can you share some of these scripts?

Sure, here is one of them:

https://github.com/ziotom78/tnds-tomasi-notebooks/blob/maste...

And here is the recording, made with asciinema:

https://asciinema.org/a/544981

Love this one.

For the clicking sound you could add something like the below command on each click.

'aplay click.wav'

If adding mouse/keyboard sounds the main challenge is the variability in sounds, for instance how hard keys are pressed. Also, repetetive sounds, or sounds that are mis-timed to the corresponding action, are worse than no sound at all.

Just have a disconnected model M that you type along with.

that's really cool, thanks for sharing

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