Community_Portal

• About this page
• How you can help!
  • Programmers
  • Non-programmers
• Future direction Features planned
• News and reviews
  • A test of PyKeylogger
  • PyKeylogger Reviews

About this page

This page lists the various ways that you can help PyKeylogger. If you've ever wanted to get involved in an open source project, now is the time - it's never been easier!

How you can help!

Programmers

• In making contributions to this project you agree to license your code under the "GPL v3 or later" - same as the current project license. You also agree to allow us the discretion to "upgrade" to newer versions of the GPL, if such are released in the future.
• Please feel free to hack around in PyKeylogger code, to add features, or anything else you would like. Just download the latest src package, or pull the latest snapshot from git, and hack away.
• Anything from the list of planned features is a good start, see also [PyKeylogger_ToDo_List].
• Any contributions will be gladly accepted as patches at sourceforge.

Non-programmers

• File bug reports or submit feature requests on the PyKeylogger SourceForge page.
• Spread the word about PyKeylogger to your friends (except maybe the ones whose keys you are logging, haha).

Future direction [Features planned]

• DONE! Enhance the logging capability so that it splits the keyboard input by window, for ease of finding it later (as opposed to the old method of dumping everything into one large log file).
• DONE! Add command line option to not log input of certain applications. (For example, Gaim - since it already logs its chats if you want to, having PyKeylogger running at the same time would be logging everything twice.)
• DONE! Add command line option to log to just one file, instead of the default logging to multiple files.
• DONE! Improve behavior when logging international keyboard layouts. Right now I am not exactly sure how to properly log things like accented and umlaut-ed vowels, etc, so our international users have to put up with less than perfect logging.
• DONE! Implement a feature where logs older than X days are automatically deleted. If you are using pykeylogger as a backup against accidental deletions, you may not want to keep months-old stuff on disk, but only say, a day's worth of stuff. Seems like it would be useful to add an option to specify maximum log age.
• DONE! Linux port of PyKeylogger
• Create a log viewer, where you can search by date, application name, and window title (and of course, text strings). Aiming for something like the Gaim log viewer.
• Another feature I plan for the log viewer is to have an option to parse the backspaces and arrow keys to recreate the final output, rather than have a bunch of [Backspace] and [LeftArrow] text in the log. Of course, if you want that to be particularly useful, you have to try to refrain from using the mouse to reposition your cursor :). I wonder if this is really going to be helpful...
• As per a suggestion I received through feature requests on sf, I want to log all kb/mouse (though maybe to start with, just kb) events, and have them be re-playable as if they are being typed. Goal is to support gui testing.
• Anything else you want to suggest? Feel free to do so by submitting feature requests.
• A more frequently updated list of things to do can be found here.

News and reviews

A test of PyKeylogger

Here is an interesting article testing various anti-spyware and antivir programs for detection of keyloggers (including our very own PyKeylogger!) Curiously, despite PyKeylogger using well-known Windows API do to the hooking of keys, only 3 out of 44 products tested detected it (or anything else, for that matter. Turns out most of the products just suck at this). Well, an interesting read, anyway.

PyKeylogger Reviews

I have found a couple of reviews of PyKeylogger. Here they are, FYI.

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http://pykeylogger.pykeylogger.qarchive.org/

The reviewer here gives us a 5 out of 5, and says:

 Very nice. I give this program a 5 out of 5. Its really good. You can't find it on the computer unless you know the short cut key's or the command. This would be a great program for office use. I had a program with people using my computer with out permission first, now I know when, who, and what they were doing.

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http://www.iterating.com/products/Pykeylogger/reviews

The review on this page gives us a 9.4 out of 10, and says:

 I used PyKeylogger when I lived in the dorm, and someone was using my computer while I was away, and forgot to log out. Leaving it running, I was able to discover who was messing up with my computer, and why. The tool only worked while I had Windows XP installed, and that's the only platform it supported. After catching the perpetrator I was able to discourage him using my computer. Also, I'm sure this neat little tool will come in handy to any parent that wants to supervise the children activity on the computer.

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