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Author Topic: IDEA: I dream of a non-creepy keystroke logger  (Read 12867 times)

iorange28880

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IDEA: I dream of a non-creepy keystroke logger
« on: June 07, 2005, 04:03 PM »
I can't find one of these.

All of the keystroke loggers I've found are designed to be hidden from the user and are apparently for nefarious purposes like spying on people and surreptitiously stealing their passwords, or geared toward parents who want to spy on their children, or whatever. I'm not interested in that; I just want a friendly and simple keystroke logger that gives me a form of backup protection when applications crash and take with them all of my hard work when I've not saved recently.

I want a visual indication that it's running with a systray icon. I don't want it to hide or be capable of being hidden, there's plenty of that creepy junk for sale. I don't want it to be aware of the network or capable of sending its log file anywhere. I just want it to hook the keyboard and record my keystroke activity for my use on the local machine ONLY.

I want to be able to right click on it and have it suck the contents of the clipboard into the log; that way if I've worked on a piece of text for a while in separate sessions but it's in a single textarea/textbox control, I can select all, copy, click the tray icon, and have the whole thing appear in the log at once as if I'd typed it on the spot.

I also want it to display the keystrokes it's logged, and I want it to be smart enough to group keystrokes by the window title that they were typed in. So in other words if I have a notepad window, a Word window, and a browser window, and I've typed in all three, it should know to group everything I've typed in the notepad document together, everything that I've typed in the Word window together, and everything I've typed in the browser window together.

It should also have a "keystrokes playback" mode that "types" a given section of a keystroke log into an active window , because I have AllChars and I use it to enter symbols and accented characters by chord-composing them, Mac and Unix style. So to get é I type ctrl;e;' and to get ö I type ctrl;o;" and to get € I type ctrl;e;=. The ;s are short pauses, I didn't use notation like "ctrl-e-=" because you might think I was holding ctrl down. I do NOT want it to record or play back keystrokes where two or more keys are held down, like ctrl-tab, alt-tab, alt-space, alt-f4, ctrl-q, etc because I don't want it to trigger unexpected application behavior when it's playing the keystrokes back. The only exception to this is ctrl-v. I don't want it to record the ctrl-v itself, but I do want it to notice that I pasted text in, and I want it to append the pasted text to the log file.

Thanks a million million times, if one of you decides to write this.
« Last Edit: August 04, 2005, 12:12 PM by mouser »

iorange28880

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Re: IDEA: I dream of a non-creepy keystroke logger
« Reply #1 on: June 07, 2005, 04:10 PM »
A window title exclusions list would also be wonderful, so I could exclude keystrokes in certain windows from being recorded like my Find And Run Robot or MSN Messenger window (Messenger Plus is already logging my IM conversations very nicely thank you:)).

mouser

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Re: IDEA: I dream of a non-creepy keystroke logger
« Reply #2 on: June 07, 2005, 09:02 PM »
it seems to me that this is a very good idea -
a key logger who's primary purpose is to maintain a kind of backup log.
i can see not just being able to exclude windows, but maybe just to specify a few select applications where such logging would be desired.

there are a lot of keylogging tools out there, it seems to me that one of them is likely to already be suitable for this.  this is probably a program a little outside of scrope of a coding snack once you get into all the extras and stuff, but its not a huge project (though i can see all the little details taking a lot of time to get right).

it might be something that we would write, if we really knew that there isn't a tool to already do this, which i suspect there may be somewhere..

unleash the google experts and softoholics!

Dragonrider

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Re: IDEA: I dream of a non-creepy keystroke logger
« Reply #3 on: June 07, 2005, 09:30 PM »
Hmmm...  Sounds like a timely topic, of general interest to users, & shouldn't be as big of a project as the screencast review just completed.  Sounds like a review topic to me mouser.   ;)

Regards
Brian Keene

REDONDOS

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Re: IDEA: I dream of a non-creepy keystroke logger
« Reply #4 on: July 02, 2005, 12:43 PM »
Ever used ActMon?

skrommel

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DONE: I dream of a non-creepy keystroke logger
« Reply #5 on: July 21, 2005, 05:35 PM »
 :) A very simple keylogger!

KeyLog logs written text to files, so put it in it's own folder. Use the tray menu to show and delete logs.

Download and install AutoHotKey from www.autohotkey.com. Save the script as KeyLog.ahk and doubleclick to run.

Skrommel


;KeyLog.ahk v1.0
;Logs written text to file, use the tray menu to show and delete log.
;Skrommel @2005

AutoTrim,Off
Menu,Tray,NoStandard
Menu,Tray,DeleteAll
Menu,Tray,Add,&Show Log,SHOW
Menu,Tray,Add,&Delete Log,DELETE
Menu,Tray,Add,&Help,HELP
Menu,Tray,Add,E&xit,EXIT

LOOP:
Input,input,V L1
If input=
  Goto,LOOP
WinGetActiveStats,wint,winw,winh,winx,winy
filename:=hexify(wint)
IfNotExist,%filename%.log
  FileAppend,`n`n[%wint%]`n,%filename%.log
FileAppend,%input%,%filename%.log
Goto,LOOP

SHOW:
Input
FileDelete,KeyLog.txt
FileAppend,,KeyLog.txt
filelist=
Loop,*.log
  filelist=%FileList%%A_LoopFileName%`n
Sort,filelist
Loop,Parse,filelist,`n
{
  If A_LoopField=
    Continue
  RunWait,cmd /c type %A_LoopField% >> KeyLog.txt,,Hide
}
Run,WordPad.exe "KeyLog.txt"
WinWait,KeyLog.txt - WordPad,,5
If ErrorLevel=1
{
  MsgBox,Can't find WordPad
  Return
}
Return

DELETE:
 FileDelete,*.log
 FileDelete,KeyLog.txt
Return

EXIT:
ExitApp

Hexify(x) ;Stolen from Laszlo
{
  StringLen,len,x
  format=%A_FormatInteger%
  SetFormat,Integer,Hex
  hex=
  Loop,%len%
  {
    Transform,y,Asc,%x%
    StringTrimLeft,y,y,2
    hex=%hex%%y%
    StringTrimLeft,x,x,1
  }
  SetFormat,Integer,%format%
  Return,hex
}

DeHexify(x)
{
   StringLen,len,x
   len:=(len-5)/2
   string=
   Loop,%len%
   {
      StringLeft,hex,x,2
      hex=0x%hex%
      Transform,y,Chr,%hex%
      string=%string%%y%
      StringTrimLeft,x,x,2
   }
   Return,string
}

HELP:
Return
« Last Edit: August 01, 2005, 03:46 AM by skrommel »

mouser

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Re: IDEA: I dream of a non-creepy keystroke logger
« Reply #6 on: August 02, 2005, 08:04 AM »
skrommel - shall i add these latest scripts to your coding snacks autohotkey pack?
would you like some ftp/web space?
do you want to claim your prize (see other thread)?

iorange28880

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Re: IDEA: I dream of a non-creepy keystroke logger
« Reply #7 on: August 14, 2005, 04:48 AM »
The Clipboard Help+Spell is useful in a lot of ways for which I wanted this Coding Snack idea, Mouser. Thanks! It really rocks.

BTW, a while back, I donated the 5 bucks to MeFi to get a login so I could Ax Metafilter(http://ask.metafilter.com) this same question, updated based on the conversation in this thread. It wasn't too conclusive but it was worth a try :-) (http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/20471). Actually, I want to recommend Ask Metafilter as very compelling reading every day. It's a lot more interesting (IMO) than Metafilter itself. I wish I had such interesting questions as these people pose!

Anyway, thanks again!!1!¡!¡1! 0Mg LoLZ0rZ for Clipboard Help+Spell and all your other amazing software (most especially Find and Run Robot); I use and appreciate it every single day. I think you probably don't get thanked enough, although this vibrant + growing community around your software is a reward of its own kind :-)

mouser

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Re: IDEA: I dream of a non-creepy keystroke logger
« Reply #8 on: August 14, 2005, 09:14 AM »
actually iorange,

if plans for clipboard help+spell continue as we have been discussing,
then there will be addon modules to automatically aid in keeping various information, and an "Activity Logger" addon, which did EXACTLY what you asked for in this thread would be one of the first things i write.  it would basically keep a log of your activity for the reasons you described.

AbteriX

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Re: IDEA: I dream of a non-creepy keystroke logger
« Reply #9 on: August 15, 2005, 09:36 AM »
Nice to see you talk already about an keylogger  :)

Sometimes i wish i had one 'cus i work with
an dammed java-web-browser-tool for documentation issue
how sometimes forgot to save what i wrote into it (web server response)

Of course not than when i copy my text bevor in the clipboard ...
... no, only if i didn't copy my text bevor pressing the [Save] button  :)

And because i did't wanna a lot of icons in the tray
it would be nice that CHS could do that some day  :)