FocusFollow

A macOS menu bar app that moves keyboard focus to the screen you're facing, using your Mac's camera and on-device head-pose detection. Turn your head to another display and start typing — no click needed.

Camera frames stay in memory on your Mac. Nothing is recorded or sent anywhere.

Features

• Screen focus: detects which display you're facing and focuses the last window you used there.
• Calibration: look at each display for about 20 seconds. Calibration is saved per display arrangement, and FocusFollow asks you to recalibrate when you plug in or remove a monitor.
• Stays out of the way: ignores quick glances, holds while you type or use the mouse, ignores looking away from every screen, and stops on sleep, lock and screen saver.
• Menu bar popover: see at a glance what FocusFollow is doing, whether the camera, Accessibility and calibration are fine (with a fix button when not), and pause or resume with the button or ⌃⌥⌘F.
• Settings: tabs for General, Switching, Windows and Displays: glance delay, pause after typing and mouse use, head-turn tolerance, cursor-follows-focus, camera, open at login.
• Window focus (experimental, off by default): after a gaze grid calibration (25 dots per screen), looking at a window on the screen you're already on focuses it. The grid fit ignores bad dots, each dot is shown on a quality map, and screens where the estimate is too coarse are skipped. It relies on head direction, so it works best with large windows that don't overlap.
• Diagnostics: a window that shows the camera, head direction, what FocusFollow thinks you're looking at, and the gaze map.
• Single instance: launching it again just brings the running copy forward.

Not built yet: focusing split panes inside terminals and editors. See ROADMAP.md.

Privacy

A camera app should be easy to check, so here is exactly what it does:

• Frames never leave memory. Each camera frame is analysed for head pose on your Mac and discarded. Nothing is written to disk or recorded.
• No network code. The source has no networking at all (no URLSession, no sockets), no analytics and no update checker. Search the code to confirm.
• Input monitoring keeps timestamps only. Accessibility is used to notice when you type or move the mouse, so it doesn't switch mid-work. What you type is never read or stored.
• Calibration stays local. The only thing saved is your per-display calibration, on your Mac.
• You can see it work. The camera indicator is on only while FocusFollow is running, and Pause (⌃⌥⌘F) turns the camera off.

Requirements

• macOS 14 Sonoma or later
• A Mac with a built-in or external camera
• Xcode 16 or later to build from source

Install

Download the DMG from the latest GitHub release, open it and drag FocusFollow.app onto Applications. The app is not notarized, so macOS blocks it the first time: open it once, then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security and choose Open Anyway.

Release builds are for Apple silicon. On an Intel Mac, build from source.

Build from source

1. Open FocusFollow.xcodeproj in Xcode.
2. In Signing & Capabilities, pick your own team (a free Personal Team works).
3. Run (⌘R). FocusFollow appears in the menu bar — there's no Dock icon.

Or from the command line:

xcodebuild -project FocusFollow.xcodeproj -scheme FocusFollow -configuration Debug -derivedDataPath build build
open build/Build/Products/Debug/FocusFollow.app

To see the windows without running the camera (Debug builds only), launch with -snapshotDir /some/folder: it writes light and dark PNGs of each window and quits.

Only one copy can run at a time, so quit a running copy before starting a new build.

To make the release DMG (needs brew install create-dmg):

scripts/make-dmg.sh   # writes dist/FocusFollow-<version>-arm64.dmg and prints its SHA-256

The app icon is drawn by scripts/make-icon.swift; rerun it to regenerate the PNGs in the asset catalog.

First run

1. Allow Camera access when asked.
2. In the menu, choose Grant Accessibility Access… and turn FocusFollow on in System Settings. It needs this to focus windows and move the pointer.
3. Choose Calibrate… and look at each highlighted screen, keeping your head natural and still.
4. Use Show Debug Window to see the camera, your head pose and which screen FocusFollow thinks you're facing.

Permissions

• Camera — head-pose detection.
• Accessibility — focusing windows, moving the pointer, and noticing keyboard and mouse activity so it doesn't switch while you're working. Only timestamps are kept, never what you type.

If a permission stops working after rebuilding, reset it and grant it again:

tccutil reset Accessibility com.arefbhrn.focusfollow
tccutil reset Camera com.arefbhrn.focusfollow

Known limits

• It uses head direction, not eye tracking, so it tells displays apart but not windows on the same screen.
• Accuracy depends on camera position, lighting and posture. Recalibrate if you move your setup.
• Minimized, hidden and other-Space windows are never focused.

License

MIT