Show your keystrokes in a Zoom call

Nobody in a Zoom call is looking at your keyboard. They are looking at a video stream of a rectangle you chose, at whatever resolution the connection allows, often in a tile next to eleven other tiles. When a panel opens because you pressed something, the only evidence they get is the panel.

You compensate by narrating: "and then I hit Command-Shift-P". That works right up until you are moving fast, or someone asks a question mid-sentence, or you press something out of habit that you did not think to mention. Then the call quietly desynchronises — half the room is still looking for the menu item you skipped.

An overlay closes the gap without you having to do anything. The keycaps appear at the same moment the panel does, in the same picture, so cause and effect arrive together over a stream that is already lagging your voice by a fraction of a second.

This is the one mechanical fact worth understanding before your next call. Zoom's share picker offers your desktop, an individual display, or a single application window, and the choice decides whether an overlay drawn above your windows makes it into the stream.

Show KeyPress draws its keycaps in a separate always-on-top window. A desktop or display share is a picture of that display, so the keycaps are in it. A share scoped to one application window carries that window's own content — and the overlay is not part of it, so the keys can simply be missing while everything looks fine on your end.

There is a nice side effect once the overlay is running: the shortcuts you use to drive the meeting itself become visible too. Mute, start and stop share, the reactions — the room sees the chord rather than watching your toolbar flicker, which is genuinely useful when you are teaching colleagues to run their own calls.

Zoom's hot keys are a subject of their own, and they have their own page here rather than a paraphrase on this one.

Sooner or later you will log into something while forty people watch. macOS handles this below the level of any app: while Secure Input is active — password fields, unlock dialogs, terminals with Secure Keyboard Entry — applications stop receiving key events at all.

Show KeyPress clears the keyboard visualization for that whole period, so no keycap is drawn and nothing reaches the stream. What the call does see in its place is a short banner reading Keyboard hidden — Secure Input, which tells the room the overlay stood down rather than froze. If you would rather it showed nothing at all, turn off Show Status HUD in Settings under General before the call.