Home > Screencast mode

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Put your keystrokes and your mouse on screen, so a screencast shows what your hands are doing.

Recording a construction is hard to follow. The viewer sees a circle appear and has no idea whether you typed a shortcut, right-clicked, or dragged something. Screencast mode draws all three, as an overlay on top of the window.

It is off by default and lives only in Preferences, under Screencast. There is no menu item and no keyboard shortcut for it, so it cannot be switched on or off by a stray key in the middle of a take.

Keystroke chips. Every modifier shortcut shows as a key cap with its command name beside it, in the lower-left corner: ⌘ D next to Duplicate. Chips stack newest at the bottom, three at most, and each one fades after about three seconds. Plain keys do not cast. Typing c to start a circle, or a digit into a field, leaves nothing on screen, so the overlay stays quiet while you are just drawing.

A click ripple. Any press anywhere in the window puts a dot and an expanding ring under the cursor and carries them with it. Not just the canvas: the Layers panel, the toolbars and the style strip all ripple too, so a viewer can follow you into a panel.

A drag. Press and hold and the ring grows to about half, then stays open and follows the cursor until you let go.

The colors say which button: left is blue, right is amber, the wheel is magenta. They follow your theme, so the overlay stays legible on a dark canvas and on a light one.

Full mouse visualizer changes where the mouse is reported, and it is on by default.

On, a mouse indicator is pinned in the lower-left corner whenever the cursor is over the canvas. The button in use lights up, and the wheel carries a small chevron showing which way you are scrolling. It is the clearer choice for a tutorial, because the viewer always knows where to look.

Off, nothing is pinned. Scrolling instead shows a small wheel icon beside the cursor and fades it out. Clicks still ripple. Use this when the corner is busy, or when the indicator would sit on top of something you are talking about.

The keystroke chips move with it. With the indicator shown they sit above it; with it hidden they drop to the corner.

• The overlay never intercepts anything. It is drawn on top and passes every click and key straight through, so you cannot mis-record because screencast mode was on.
• In the combined window the chips follow whichever pane you are working in, so a shortcut aimed at the node graph does not appear over the model canvas.
• Both preferences are remembered between sessions. Turn them off when you finish recording, or your next ordinary session will ripple at you.
• The overlay is part of the window, so anything that captures the window captures it. There is nothing to set up in your recorder.

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• Preferences: where both settings live, and everything else on that dialog.
• Themes: the overlay colors follow your theme, so pick it before you record.
• Videos: the tutorials on the Algorista channel, recorded this way.