Down and up
Real mechanical switches make two sounds per press — the bottom-out and the release. Clatterbox plays both, so a fast typist sounds like one.
for windows, macos & linux
Every key you press
should sound like it matters.
Clatterbox sits quietly in your tray and gives your keyboard — any keyboard, membrane or otherwise — the click and thock of a proper mechanical board. It's free, it's open source, and it never once looks at what you're typing.
try it — type below
Sound is off until your first keystroke. No audio plays automatically.
What it does
Panned to key position
Press Q and the click leans left. Press P and it leans right. The stereo image tracks where your hands actually are on the board.
No two clacks alike
Pitch drifts a little on every strike, drawn from a handful of real takes per key, so long typing sessions don't loop.
Four packs, out of the box
Classic Office and Tactile are recordings of real switches under CC0 license. Thock and Click are synthesized — no samples, no loading, always on.
Lives in the tray
Switch packs, mute, or quit from the tray icon, with an optional toggle to launch at login. The settings window opens only when you ask for it.
What Clatterbox never does
A program that hears every keystroke is a program you should be able to trust completely. These aren't settings you can turn off — they're not built in the first place.
- Never logs a key. The keyboard hook reduces each press to a sound class and a pan position, in a local variable, and drops it. Nothing is written down.
- Never phones home. No updater, no telemetry, no crash reporter. Zero outbound network connections — the app's content-security policy forbids remote origins outright.
- Never needs your samples to work. The synthesized packs generate sound in real time. Delete every audio file on disk and Clatterbox still clicks.
Bring your own switches
Recorded your own board, or found a set of samples you like better? A pack is a folder and one text file. Drop it in Clatterbox's packs folder, and it shows up in the switcher — no rebuild, no plugin API to learn.
- Only
default.downis required — Clatterbox derives release sounds and special keys (space, enter, backspace, modifiers) from it automatically. - Supports WAV, OGG, FLAC, and MP3, up to 2 seconds per sample.
- Per-class gain lets you level-match samples pulled from different recordings.
# my-pack/pack.toml
schema = 1
name = "Slate Linear"
author = "Jane Doe"
license = "CC0-1.0"
description = "Deep, muted linear."
[sounds.default]
down = ["down-1.wav", "down-2.wav"]
up = ["up-1.wav"]
[sounds.space]
down = ["space-down-1.wav"]Download Clatterbox
Free. Open source under Apache-2.0. No account, no signup.
v0.1 releases are unsigned — your OS will ask you to confirm the first launch. Instructions are in the README.