Controlling Your Keyboard With Your Feet

September 8, 2026  ·  How-To Guides  ·  6 min read

Your feet are free, so put them to work

Most of us drive a computer with two hands and nothing else. Meanwhile our feet sit under the desk doing nothing at all. A USB foot pedal fixes that: it is just a big button you press with your foot, and it can send any keystroke you like.

Transcriptionists have used them for decades so their hands never leave the keyboard. But there is nothing transcription-specific about the hardware. If a task involves pressing a key while your hands are busy, a pedal can take it over.

I use mine for two completely different things:

• Playing games. Lean left and lean right are mapped to my outside pedals, so those keys come off my hands entirely.
• Recording video. The pedals drive my teleprompter so I can move through a script at my own pace with my hands free.

Push-to-talk, a mute key, a screenshot, start and stop recording, a macro you fire constantly, a step-through in a debugger - anything you can put on a key, you can put on a pedal.

The teleprompter setup is the harder of my two cases, so that is the one I will walk through. The same steps apply whatever you want your pedals to do.

The problem I was solving: a script that will not wait

If you record yourself talking to a camera, a teleprompter is a real help. After using one for a while, though, I found one thing consistently worked against me.

The script scrolls at a fixed speed. You set it before you start, you hit play, and from that moment on you are chasing it. Read a little slower than you planned and the text creeps up past your eyeline. Read a little faster and you are sitting there waiting for it to catch up, doing that awkward pause on camera.

The bigger issue for me is ad-libbing. I do it constantly. I will be reading along, think of a better way to say something, or remember a detail worth adding, and go off script for fifteen seconds. Meanwhile the prompter has happily scrolled on without me. Now I have to find my place again, on camera, mid-sentence.

The obvious fix is to control the scroll yourself. Except the keyboard is over there, and the prompter is over here, mounted on the camera on the other side of the room. You cannot reach it. And even if you could, you would be on camera reaching for a keyboard.

Your hands are busy and your eyes need to stay on the lens, but your feet are free. That is what makes a foot pedal a good fit.

Picking a pedal

A basic three-button USB foot pedal runs about $25, and that is what I use. Three buttons is a good number - it gives you a left, a middle and a right without needing to remember which is which.

Elgato sells its own Stream Deck Pedal for around $90. If you already use a Stream Deck, that is the easiest path by far - there is a first-party Camera Hub plugin and you can skip most of the setup below.

I already had a generic USB pedal, so the question was how to make a generic pedal send the keys I wanted.

Step one: turn on the Prompter hotkeys

The Elgato Prompter has global keyboard shortcuts that let you move through your script a chunk at a time instead of relying on the timed scroll:

Action	Windows	macOS
Play / Pause	Ctrl + Alt + P	Ctrl + Cmd + P
Next chapter	Ctrl + Alt + Page Down	Ctrl + Cmd + Page Down
Previous chapter	Ctrl + Alt + Page Up	Ctrl + Cmd + Page Up

They are off by default. Open Elgato Camera Hub, go to Preferences, and tick "Control Prompter script with Hotkeys". You need Camera Hub 1.11 or newer. Miss this step and your pedal will send perfectly good keystrokes that absolutely nothing is listening for - so it is worth doing first.

Step two: a "chapter" is just a paragraph

How far one tap moves you is set by how you paragraph the script, not by any setting in the software.

Camera Hub splits your script into chapters at every blank line. That is the entire rule. So how far one tap of your foot moves you is completely under your control - it is just how you paragraph the script.

Which means you can write the script for the pedal. Put a blank line wherever you might wander off topic. Now when you finish ad-libbing, one tap picks up exactly where you meant to be. No hunting, no chasing a scroll you cannot catch.

In practice, two to four spoken lines per chapter feels about right. Longer than that and you are reading off the bottom of the screen with no way to nudge it. Shorter and you are tap-dancing through the take.

I stopped using the play button almost entirely. The script does not scroll at all now - it just advances when I tell it to.

Step three: map the pedal to those keys

A generic USB foot pedal shows up as a keyboard-ish device, and you need software to decide what it types. I use Pedable, a free utility from NCH Software. It has been around forever, it is tiny, and it does one job.

There are two limitations to work around.

First: Pedable's setup screen will not record Page Up or Page Down. Press those keys while it is listening and it simply ignores them. So the exact shortcuts the Prompter needs are the ones you cannot enter.

Second: Pedable only remembers one configuration at a time. My pedals are mapped to Q and E for a game I play. Setting up for a recording session meant re-mapping them by hand, then re-mapping them back afterwards. Every single time.

The tool I built to fill the gap

I wrote a free utility called PPW - Pedable Profile Wrapper. It sits alongside Pedable and adds the one thing it is missing: profiles.

You save each setup once - "Gaming" with Q and E, "Elgato Prompter" with the chapter navigation keys - and switch between them with a single click. It also writes the key combinations Pedable's own interface refuses to record, so Ctrl+Alt+Page Down is no longer a problem.

How do you enhance a program that was not built to be enhanced?

Pedable is a fixed application. I wanted to use it, but I could not enter Ctrl+Alt+Page Up anywhere in its interface. The screen simply would not take those keys.

The program stores its pedal assignments in the Windows registry. Once I understood how it reads those values, I could write them myself - and Pedable picks them up on startup and uses them exactly as if I had typed them in. The limitation was in the input screen, not in the program. So I wrote a new interface that puts the values in for me.

Working out the format took a few tries. My first reading of it looked correct and produced sensible-looking values, but the pedals did nothing. What settled it was letting Pedable do the work: I set a combination by hand in its own screen, then read back exactly what it had written. With a known-good example to compare against, the format was clear.

Two details matter if you try this yourself. Pedable stores each value as text rather than as a number, and writing a number leaves the pedal defined but dead. And a shortcut is not one value - it is a short sequence of keys held together, which is why Ctrl+Alt+Page Down works at the data level even though the setup screen will not record it.

That solved the first problem. The second one came up right after: Pedable only holds one configuration at a time, and I switch between recording video and playing games. Every switch meant re-entering the mappings by hand. So the new interface became a profile manager - save each setup once, then swap between them with a click.

The wider point is worth keeping in mind for any small utility. If a tool almost does what you need, find out where it keeps its settings before you go looking for a replacement. You may be able to add the missing piece from outside and leave the original program completely alone.

A few things I made sure it does properly, because I use this on my own machine:

• It takes an automatic backup of your Pedable settings before every single change, and keeps the last 30.
• It only touches Pedable's own settings under your user account. It needs no administrator rights and changes nothing else on your system.
• It shuts Pedable down cleanly rather than killing it, so Pedable does not think it crashed and nag you the next time it starts.
• It is one self-contained file - no installer, nothing to add to your system.

It is free, the source is public, and you can build it yourself if you would rather not run someone else's binary.

How it works in practice

The recording process is much smoother now.

I write the script with deliberate paragraph breaks. I hit record. I talk. When I reach the end of a thought, I tap my right foot and the next chunk appears. If I go off on a tangent - which I do - the prompter simply waits. When I am ready, one tap and I am back on script exactly where I intended.

No chasing a scroll bar. No reaching off camera for a keyboard. No re-recording a take because the text got away from me.

The total cost was a $25 foot pedal and two pieces of free software.

None of this is really about teleprompters. Your feet can hold a couple of keys for you, whatever those keys happen to be, and switching them from one job to another takes a single click. Mine go from leaning around corners in a game to running a teleprompter in about two seconds.

Quick setup checklist

For any use:

1. Get a USB foot pedal (a basic three-button one is fine).
2. Install Pedable and run its wizard so it detects your pedal.
3. Install PPW and create a profile for each thing you want your pedals to do.
4. Click Apply to switch between them whenever you change tasks.

If you are using it with the Elgato Prompter, two more steps:

5. In Elgato Camera Hub: Preferences → tick "Control Prompter script with Hotkeys", then apply PPW's built-in "Elgato Prompter" profile.
6. Write your script with a blank line wherever you might ad-lib, and tap to advance.

If your pedals feel backwards - next and previous swapped - that is normal. Pedal numbering does not always match physical left-to-right and it varies by device. Just swap those two values in PPW's profile editor. Nothing is broken.