Track Your Keyboard Usage

Hey guys, this is Matt from Heads101, and today I'm going to be showing you an app I made which lets you keep track of how often you hit each key on your keyboard. This is useful for figuring out how efficient your keyboard layout is, or for experimenting with different keyboard layouts, or just to get a sense of how your hands move around while you're typing on the computer.

So, the app is called Heat Key. You can download it in the description of this video, and I'm basically just going to walk through how to use it and what it does.

When you first open up the app, there will be this empty list, and the first thing you're going to want to do is hit this plus button. This creates a profile, and the profile will store all the information about how many keys you hit and which keys they were. You might want to create a profile for gaming, a profile for programming, a separate profile for maybe homework or something like that to get an idea of how you use your keyboard in different situations.

But I'm going to call this profile “Demo” because this is just a demonstration. The next step—and this you'll only have to do once—is you hit “Start Recording.” This thing will pop up, and you're going to have to enable something in system preferences that lets it listen to your keys or watch what keys you hit.

So here we go, I wanted to set some preferences, unlock this lock, and I'm going to check Heat Key. Now that I've checked Heat Key, I can quit System Preferences and hit “Start Recording” again. Now, I will never have to go through that System Preferences thing again, but now it's actually recording which keys I hit.

If I go into Spotlight and I type “TextMate,” you can see that it already figured out which keys I hit. By the way, I'm using Dvorak, so you probably won't realize—like, this is the E key, this is the A key, um, M, you know. Maybe this is M; anyway, so I open up TextMate and I'll just type a sentence.

You can see what it's doing here: the more times I hit a key, the more red it becomes. So I hit this key five times—this is the E key. I've hit that more times than this key, which I've only hit two times. So this is more red, and it basically makes a visual representation of how many times I hit each key.

Now you can see here, right now, it's not counting the space bar. So if I check the space bar, it will count that. The reason I had this as an option is that if you hit the space bar so many more times than every other letter, the space bar is kind of red, and the rest of things are diluted. But you can definitely enable that to look at that.

The other thing is, let's say this is a capitalized sentence. I want to see how many times I hit the T key with Shift held down. Then I check this Shift button, and actually, it's the only capital letter I've typed so far with this demo. If I type like capital A, um, capital O, you see them appear here because I was holding down Shift.

When you check this Shift box, it only shows keys that I pressed while holding down Shift. I can look—I hit Command and Space, so you can see to get to Spotlight, the only things I hit with Command down right now are Space.

If I hit like Command A to select all, you can see it go there. Command O to open a file. So I'm just looking right now at these different modifiers, so I can see which keys I held down with an assortment of modifier keys. I can also optionally show the space bar.

So this is currently recording on my key presses to generate this graph. If I hit “Stop Recording,” it will stop, and you can see like if I spam the keyboard now, it's not appearing on the graph. So this is basically the entire heart of the app: you just hit start and stop recording, you can see how many times you hit each key, you can check off the modifiers, and you can let it show you the space bar.

Another cool feature about this app, which I thought was essential because I needed it to make this video, actually, is that if I select a profile like Demo, I can go up to, let’s see, File, and I can click on Import or Export. So if I hit Export, I will be able to save this demo as a file, and then I'll be able to import it later through the import option.

I actually used Heat Key for the past couple of days and got some good readings, so I exported those before I made this video. Now I'm going to import them to show you. The import key shortcut is Command I.

This is what my keyboard heat map looks like when I'm typing with Dvorak and I'm just programming. You can see this is the home row; the home row is the row where you rest your fingers most of the time.

So it is reasonable that the keys like E and T that I hit very much, as you can see, that's a lot of times, are on the home row, which means I don't have to move my hands from the home row as much. The bottom row is actually very infrequent compared—like you can see how much lighter it is, and the top row is mostly things that I utilize a lot on the left here. Well, let’s see what it is; it's apostrophe, comma, and period in that order.

Of course, in programming, sometimes I use these a little more, and this is a semicolon. I definitely like 1,200 semicolons and 5,000 A's; I obviously hit semicolon a lot, and that's because I was programming while I was recording this. Semicolon is a character you hit a lot while programming.

So anyway, this just gives me statistics and shows that Dvorak is pretty efficient, but probably if these two keys were in the middle here, it would be a little more efficient.

Let’s see, I hit the space bar a lot more than anything else. But yeah, if these two keys were down here, that would probably make it more efficient. But anyway, Dvorak did pretty well in terms of this heat map in this test.

Now I'm going to import another Dvorak one, which is just where I was doing homework, so it's a little bit different. If you look at the programming one, I definitely hit Tab more. I hit some symbols and an Escape key and the Delete key a lot more than when I'm just typing prose.

This is like my homework, my essays, whatever, chat conversations, so it's much more letter centric. I hit the semicolon key a lot less when I'm typing prose, and, um, yeah. And I can see the capital letters too; I actually hit—this is pretty interesting—I actually hit these symbols more than I hit the numbers, I guess, or well, 13 times for that number, 120 times for that symbol.

So yeah, I do hit these up keys a lot more with Shift held down, so that's probably a good thing to know. Command Tab I use profusely compared to Command S.

Let me show you something about Command S: if I hit the Command key under programming, first let’s look at how many times I hit E key—like 9,000—I hit Command S almost 4,000 times. That's because I save my code very, very regularly. I'd say once every, probably 10 times a minute, I save the code. Maybe less than that.

But it's actually to the point where it's just kind of disruptive because I save so often. So you can see I hit Command S a lot.

And now, finally, I'm going to import a profile which wasn't mine; this was exported by John, who's the other member of Mack Heads 101, and it is him typing in QWERTY. He doesn't type nearly as much as me, so you can see he didn't hit these keys—like he hit the Q key like three times, and that was probably while he was typing QWERTY, like literally the word QWERTY.

But here we see the Enter key. But the important thing to note is that in QWERTY, usually a lot of the common keys like E are on the top row instead of the home row, so you have to move your hands a little more.

Yeah, the Delete key a lot too; he also uses Photoshop quite a bit, so it's likely that these results are slightly skewed, and they're not the best just because he didn't type that much.

But anyway, this is the app. I'd love to hear what you guys think of the app or what you guys think of your keyboard layout after using this app and experimenting and, you know, getting a sense.

So thanks for watching Mack Heads 101. Subscribe and goodbye!