Nohboard is a free virtual keyboard software for PC that overlays a keyboard on PC screen. Unlike other virtual keyboard software, you can’t use it to press keys. Instead, it actually shows which keys have you pressed using your normal keyboard. So, when you press any key on your keyboard, it gets highlighted on this virtual keyboard software.
In the animation below you can see how the keys highlight when the corresponding key is hit on the physical keyboard.
You can customize the screen keyboard as per your preference. You can change the font color of the background and keys of the keyboard as well. You can choose from four different layouts of keyboard (Scandinavian, German, French and U.S) and five different categories of keyboard (Full, Basic, No Number, Gamer and Mouse).
The software is of great use for the the live streamers and people who wish to make video tutorials for their projects or simply to share their game expertise on Youtube.
How to use Virtual Screen Keyboard to Show Keys Being Pressed on Keyboard:
The software is tiny in size and easy to use. There is no installation required, you just need to download the zipped file, and run the application from the extracted folder.
Using this software is pretty easy. When you run the application, it will show the keyboard on the screen. This keyboard will stay on top of all the applications. When you type anything on your keyboard, it will highlight the corresponding key on this virtual keyboard, as you can see in the animated gif in beginning of this article.
That’s pretty much all you need to know to start using this keyboard software. The main part of this on screen keyboard are the various customization settings that it provides. Let’s explore those.
Settings of Nohboard Keyboard Visualizer Software:
Right click anywhere on the keyboard displayed on screen to access its Settings.
Here you can change the font size of the keyboard buttons appearing on the keyboard, background color, the color of the keys when pressed.
Apart from all of these you can resize the screen keyboard and even lock the mouse movement from the setting options.
What I like most in the settings part is that you can choose what type of keyboard should be displayed on the screen. It supports five keyboard options:
- Basic: The normal looking keyboard but smaller in size, but fewer keys.
- Full: Full sized keyboard
- Games: Just the four directional arrow keys.
- Mouse: Shows the basic movement of the mouse (scrolls, left and right click etc)
- NoNum: Displays the entire keyboard except the number part.
You can see some of these keyboards in the second screenshot, in the beginning of this review.
Different Keyboard Layouts:
Apart from different types of keyboards, it also supports four different keyboard layouts:
- Scandinavian
- French
- German
- U.S.
Final Verdict
NohBoard is an efficient software to show on screen the keys that you are actually pressing on your keyboard. This could be pretty useful if you are doing online demos, screencasts, and stuff like that, to show your audience which keys are you pressing. The layout can sometime tend to be too big, but you can resize this software based on your preference.
All in all, it does serves its purpose well.