dale lane

Overview

Counting and visualising which keyboard keys I press the most often

Background

I noticed something yesterday.

The lettering on my left Ctrl button is a lot more faded than the lettering on my right Ctrl button.

I must press the left Ctrl button more often than I do the right one.

That got me looking at the rest of the keys on the keyboard. Some of them are faded, too. Some a little, some a lot.

I must press some of those keys more than I do others.

I’ve played hangman, so I know that there are some letters that occur more frequently in English words than others. So I could have just said that those are the keys I probably use the most and left it at that.

But… I don’t spend that much time writing documents or large chunks of English.

I’m a code monkey. I’m not sure that distribution would necessarily apply to me.

For example, I probably use the semi-colon key quite a lot – at the end of every line when writing in some languages. That wouldn’t be true for people writing English.

So I wondered how much I use each keyboard key in comparison to each other.

Being an obsessive compulsive geek, I couldn’t leave that as an idle wondering. I had to find out. I had to go and get the data.

Getting the data

I wrote a quick-and-dirty keylogger in Python. It counts how many times I press each key, and every 15 minutes write the counts to a file.

It’s very hacky – for example, I’ve not added a way to stop the keylogger, so I have to use taskkill when I want to stop it 🙂

Oh, and it’s Windows-specific, as I used pyHook.

import pythoncom, pyHook
import timer
from copy import copy
from time import sleep
from threading import Timer

currentCounts = {}
countsToStore = {}

def onKeyDown(event):
    keyname = event.GetKey()
    if keyname not in currentCounts:
        currentCounts[keyname] = 1
    else:
        currentCounts[keyname] += 1

def storeCounts():
    while True:
        countsToStore = copy(currentCounts)
        wordlefile = open("keyswordle.txt", "w")
        print>>wordlefile, "key\tcount"
        for keyname in countsToStore:
            label = keyname
            if keyname.startswith("Media_"):
                label = keyname[6:]
            print>>wordlefile, label + "\t" + str(countsToStore[keyname])
        wordlefile.close()
        countsToStore = {}
        sleep(900)

captureThread = Timer(900.0, storeCounts)
captureThread.start()

hookmgr = pyHook.HookManager()
hookmgr.KeyDown = onKeyDown
hookmgr.HookKeyboard()
pythoncom.PumpMessages()

Visualising the data

I used the IBM Word Cloud Generator to turn the counts into a word cloud.

I wrote my Python script so that it would write the key-press counts to a file in a format that the word cloud generator would understand.

To run it, I used the following config file:

font: c:/windows/fonts/georgiab.ttf
format: tab
inputencoding: UTF-8
firstline: headings
wordcolumn: key
weightcolumn: count
background: FFFFFF
palette: 2367CD, 3423CD, 8923CD, CD23BC, CD2367, CD3423, CD8923, BCCD23, 67CD23, 23CD34, 23CD89, 23BCCD, 4C88E1, 81ABEA, E1A54C, EAC081
placement: HorizontalCenterLine
shape: SQUARISH
orientation: HORIZONTAL
stripnumbers: false

and the following command:

java -jar ibm-word-cloud.jar -c config.txt -w 800 -h 600 < keyswordle.txt > keyswordle.png

And that’s pretty much it. I had a pretty word cloud to show me how much I press each key on my keyboard compared with the others.

Why did I write my own keylogger?

I’m a little paranoid. Googling for “keylogger” and running the first setup.exe I found didn’t feel like it’d be too safe.

I’m sure there are trustworthy keyloggers out there, but writing a bit of Python only took me ten minutes which is probably less time than I would have spent researching ones already out there!

Did you “fix” the data?

I removed ‘Space’ from the visualisation. It turns out I press the space bar a lot – making the rest of the word cloud a little difficult to interpret.

What have I learnt doing this?

Erm… almost nothing. I think I learnt a depressing little bit about just how easily I can get side-tracked obsessing about trivial and unimportant details. 🙂

Tags: keylogger, python, visualisation, wordle

This entry was posted on Friday, June 3rd, 2011 at 9:05 am and is filed under code. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.