keyloggers on linux

I’ve been trying to find (for entirely legit reasons*) a decent keylogger for linux. The pickings are surprisingly slim – as one upstart option puts it:

Novice users, however, are usually limited to a narrow set of the following tools:

lkl

from 2005,

uberkey

, which appears dead,

THC-vlogger

, made by a renowned group of hackers, and

PyKeylogger

. All these tools have their pros and cons. Lkl, for example, sometimes abnormally repeats keys and its keymap configuration is rather awkward for a range of users. Uberkey, which is just over a hundred lines of code, also often repeats keys and what is worse, it makes your mouse move abruptly, loosing any sense of control. PyKeylogger, on the other hand, while very feature rich, only works in X environment. Finally, there is vlogger, …umm…, about which I cannot say anything specifically, only that it is receiving low score all around the web and it only logs shell sessions.

I’d add that lkl managed to crash my system within 5 minutes of using it, requireing a hard reboot to get things back up. So I’m currently deep in thinking

surely it can’t be *that* hard?

  • reason: I find it useful to have statistics on my activity. Counting keypresses is pretty useless as a direct way of measuring productive work — but it’s a pretty good early indicator of when I’m getting too sleepy or too hyper.

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