App-aware touch control surface for your desktop. A Stream Deck-like deck of buttons, sliders, scroll strips, and a manual control mode (a single combined trackpad + keyboard passthrough), rendered in any browser on any touchscreen device, driven by a local daemon that watches the focused application and swaps layouts automatically.
- Control your desktop from your phone, or tablet, or laptop
- Control multiple computers from one surface
- Control slides/presentations
- Get custom controls for each app you are using — including websites: play/pause and skip on YouTube or Netflix, or turn a site into an on-screen piano (see Web-app layouts; title-based, so best-effort today)
- Automatically switch display depending on which app is active
- Expose hotkeys for launching apps, or keyboard shortcuts
- Use phone as a mouse, scrollbar, and keyboard controller
- Voice typing from your phone to desktop
Pre-alpha, but usable day-to-day. Here's what deckd can do today and what's still planned.
Working today
- Automatic per-app layouts — focus a window on the desktop and the phone's browser flips to that app's buttons automatically.
- Web-app layouts — treat a website as an app. A layout can claim a site by matching the browser's window title (e.g. YouTube and Netflix media controls), driving each site's own keyboard shortcuts. See Web-app layouts.
- Buttons that fire keystrokes, shell commands, launch a terminal, or call D-Bus methods.
- Macros — chain multiple actions in a single button press, with delays and optional continue-on-error.
- Button styling — bundled icons (Lucide glyphs + Simple Icons brand logos) and per-button background colours, set in YAML.
- Scroll strip — an always-on right-side jogstrip to scroll the focused window, with release momentum.
- Manual control mode — the phone becomes a trackpad (move, tap, right-click, drag-lock) and a keyboard, so you can type into and point at the focused app for the things layouts don't cover (URL bars, chat boxes, ad-hoc commands).
- App badge — the focused app's name, icon, and accent color show in the bottom bar so you can tell at a glance what you're controlling.
- Chrome media indicator — the media icon sprouts a pulsing green dot whenever a media player is playing (passive playback indicator), independent of the browser view.
- Now playing — control any supported media player (Spotify, Firefox, VLC, etc.) from a dedicated chrome view, with album art, per-player transport controls, and now-playing metadata.
- Running programs list — tap a layout-grid icon in the bottom chrome to open a list of every open window on the host, labeled by the layout the window would match. Tap a row to raise (focus) that window and close the list. Enumeration and raise are GNOME-only today (via the focus extension); other backends show the list's "unsupported on this platform" empty state.
- VLC media widgets — full VLC control surface with play/pause, seek, volume, album art. Configurable art sources (VLC embedded art + iTunes fallback).
- Live sensor widgets — meter and stats widgets pushed to the client in real time (CPU %, memory %, etc.), bound to daemon-side sensor sources.
- GUI layout editor — build and edit layouts from the browser without hand-editing YAML: a widget palette, a drag-to-reorder reflow canvas with span and overflow controls, a properties panel (labels, icons via a searchable picker, colours, actions and macros), and new-layout creation — saved back to disk over the write API. In development, but usable today. See Layout editor.
- Live layout editing — edit a layout file on the desktop (by hand or via the GUI editor) and every connected phone/tablet re-renders instantly; a bad edit shows an error in place instead of crashing.
- Per-device tuning — a settings panel for scroll speed/direction, trackpad sensitivity, content and text size, bar sizes, and keep-screen-awake, all saved on the device.
- Addressable client views — the layout, manual control, now playing, settings, editor, and running-windows views have their own URL paths for deep links and browser history.
- Keep screen awake while the surface is in use.
- Install to home screen (PWA) for a fullscreen, app-like surface.
- Password auth — every client authenticates with a shared password (on by default;
--no-authdisables it for local development). See Client auth. - LAN scope control — bind the daemon to a specific network interface (
--bind iface:wlan0) or literal address; defaults to localhost-only for safety. - Accessibility — keyboard navigation, visible focus ring, screen-reader landmarks and live announcements, larger controls, high contrast, and reduced motion.
- Runs on Linux: GNOME (Wayland), KDE Plasma (Wayland), X11
- Runs on MacOS (barely tested)
Planned
- Screensaver & suspend sync — dim/lock the surface when the desktop sleeps.
- One-step NixOS install — a production module instead of the current spike.
- Multiple simultaneous clients with per-device layouts and resolutions.
- Soundboard — trigger sound clips from the deck.
- Multi-daemon chooser — pair and pick between several desktops.
- Reliable web-app detection — a browser extension reporting the active tab's real URL, so sites match by domain/path instead of the current window-title heuristic (#90).
- Windows support
- Packing and deployment
The original inspiration was the Stream Deck, and I like all these projects. I wanted something that could do more, have open ended controls, and work across platforms.
| Feature | deckd | Stream Deck* | KDE Connect | Apple Touch Bar | Remote Touchpad |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Controller agnostic | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Cross platform | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Connection | Browser (WiFi) | USB | WiFi | Built-in | WiFi |
| Custom layouts | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | 🟡 | ❌ |
| Custom layouts for web apps* | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Open source | ✅ | 🟡† | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Browser-based client | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Keyboard command triggering | ✅ | ✅ | 🟡 | 🟡 | ❌ |
| Global media control | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ |
| Mouse/touchpad control | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
*Make layouts for any website with keyboard controls. Examples: YouTube, Google Meet, Twitch
†OpenDeck, and Boatswain are open source; Elgato's SDK is not
┌──────────┐
│ Phone / │
│ Tablet │
│ Browser │
└────┬─────┘
│
WebSocket (ws://)
│
┌──────────────────┼───────────────────┐
│ deckd daemon │
│ (aiohttp, asyncio) │
│ │
│ ┌──────────┐ ┌──────────┐ │
│ │ Layout │ │ Action │ │
│ │ Loader │ │ Dispatch │ │
│ └──────────┘ └────┬─────┘ │
│ │ │ │
└─────────┼───────────┼────────────────┘
│ │
layouts/*.yaml ┌─────┴─────┬──────────┐
│ │ │
uinput shell D-Bus
(evdev) (subprocess) gdbus
│ │
scroll + keys + pointer ┌───────┴───────┐
│ │ │
/dev/uinput GNOME Shell (xdotool —
Extension any X11 DE)
deckd-focus
@local
┌──────────────────┐
│ Focus watchers │
└──────────────────┘
GNOME Shell ext. (Wayland, GNOME)
KWin script (Wayland, KDE Plasma)
xdotool (any X11 session)
osascript (macOS)
See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the component breakdown and key flows.
deckd needs Python 3.11+ and Node 18+. In brief:
uv venv --python 3.12
uv pip install -e ".[dev,uinput,dbus]"
cd client && npm install && cd ..
just build-client
just run-daemon # serves the client at http://127.0.0.1:8765Then open http://127.0.0.1:8765 in any browser. The full install story —
per-platform setup (macOS, KDE Plasma Wayland, X11), phone/tablet pairing,
/dev/uinput permissions, and running deckd as a login service — is in the
user & setup guide.
- User & setup guide — install, per-platform setup, writing layouts, the client features, and the development loop.
- Reference — every CLI flag, environment variable, and HTTP endpoint.
- Architecture — how the daemon, client, and focus watchers fit together.
- Platform parity — what's verified working on each OS.
- Testing — the test ladder and integration gaps.
- Agent onboarding — repository map and read order for contributors and agents.
deckd is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your
option) any later version. See LICENSE for the full text.