Contact
Reporting a problem
Tickets: sourceforge.net/p/keypressosd/tickets/
That is the right place for anything reproducible — a key that produces no entry, a panel on the wrong monitor, a hotkey that does nothing, a setting that appears to be ignored, a copy that disappeared. It is public, so the next person with the same problem can find it.
What to put in it
About → Copy Details, then paste. That is the version, the build, the Windows build and the runtime, all on the clipboard — the first question anyone reading a report has to answer is which build is this, and those five lines answer it. See About KeyPressOSD.
Then whichever of these apply:
| Which mode you were in | Keystrokes or typing. The two share almost no display code, so this narrows a report more than anything else in this table. |
| Whether the window was elevated | Task Manager, an installer, an editor opened as administrator. A copy of KeyPressOSD that is not elevated is shown nothing at all by one that is, and that accounts for most of what gets reported. |
| Whether KeyPressOSD is elevated | The About dialogue says so, and only when it is. The tray tooltip says so too. |
| The exact keys | "Held Ctrl, pressed A, released Ctrl" says far more than "the overlay disappeared". |
KeyPressOSD.json | For anything about appearance, position, timing or which windows are watched. It holds settings only — no captured input. |
KeyPressOSD-crash.log | Only if the tray icon vanished. See below. |
Those two answers — which mode, and whether the window was elevated — explain most of what gets reported, which is why they are first.
If it disappeared
If the tray icon has gone, the process ended, and there may be a file saying why: KeyPressOSD-crash.log, beside KeyPressOSD.json. The System tab shows that folder.
It exists only when something has failed, so its absence is itself an answer — the copy was closed rather than lost. Send the last entry. It contains no keystrokes, no typed text, no window titles and no process names: it records the failure, how long the copy had been running, whether it was elevated, and how many drawing handles it held. See Troubleshooting for what an entry looks like, and Privacy for what is and is not in it.
Print Screen
If Print Screen produces no entry for you, that is a known limitation and the one thing that would help most is which keyboard you have. What a physical press produces differs between keyboards, and that is exactly the part that has never been established.
Ideas and questions
The tickets are as good for "could it do this?" as for "this is broken". Several of the settings exist because the behaviour without them was reported.
Two things are out of scope by design rather than by omission, so they are worth knowing before asking: text expansion, key remapping and macros, because this application observes input and never injects any — which is what lets the privacy statements in this manual be unconditional. See Known limitations.
If you are asking for something another on-screen display does, saying what you use it for helps more than the feature's name: the useful part is usually the situation, not the label.
By email
For anything that should not be on a public ticket:
- a screenshot or a settings file holding a process name you would rather not publish;
- something you believe is a security problem — please say what it lets an attacker do, and allow a little time for a fix before publishing it anywhere.
Privacy, in one line
KeyPressOSD never writes a keystroke to disk and sends nothing anywhere except the update check, which fetches a version file over HTTPS when you choose it and uploads nothing about you. Privacy is the full account, including the two files it does write.
Before you write
Troubleshooting covers the commonest reports, and each has a specific cause worth ruling out first:
- nothing appears — usually paused, an excluded program, an elevated window in front, or the panel sitting on a monitor you are not facing. Open Settings and watch the live preview: the line under it names the corner and the monitor the panel went to.
Alt+Tabshows nothing — another program's keyboard hook got there first. Reclaim Keyboard Priority in the tray menu fixes that one, but only when the other program is not elevated, and the two faults look identical from outside.- a setting had no effect — either Apply was not pressed, or a value already in the settings file outranks a changed default.