facelight

The macOS Edge Light, made for Omarchy.
Your screen lights your face on every call. It turns on with the camera, off when you hang up, and lives in your bar.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/luisvzr/facelight/main/install.sh | bash

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Mac users got Edge Light: the moment the camera turns on, the screen grows a soft, warm halo that lights your face like a ring light. On Omarchy you got… a dark face in a dark room.

facelight brings it home. It's built for Omarchy's Hyprland desktop, slots into the bar right next to Reminder and Night light, and installs the way Omarchy does: one line, done.

What you get

💡 It lights up by itself. Join a Meet, Zoom or Teams call, or open OBS, and a warm ring fades in around your screen. Hang up and it fades out. You don't need a shortcut or a setting.

🖱️ It never gets in your way. Clicks go straight through the ring. Move the mouse toward the edge and a soft hole opens around the cursor and follows it, the same way it does on macOS.

🧭 It lives in your bar. Hover the indicators next to the clock and facelight sits there with the others. It glows while the ring is on, and one click turns it on or off by hand, for example to light a selfie or kill the light mid-call.

🪶 It costs you nothing. Omarchy is fast, and facelight keeps it that way. It's one ~50 KB C binary that talks to Wayland directly, with no GTK, no Electron and no Python.

	CPU	Memory
Waiting for a call	0%	2.6 MB
Light on	0.4%	28 MB
Light on, cursor sweeping the edge	~5%	28 MB

_{Measured on a 1920×1080 Omarchy desktop.}

🍎 Same look as the Mac. The ring thickness, corner radius, glow falloff and two-layer cursor hole all come from reverse engineering Apple's own RingLightHelper (see how it works on macOS).

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/luisvzr/facelight/main/install.sh | bash

The installer:

• builds facelight, installing any missing build tools with omarchy pkg add
• turns on the background service
• adds the 💡 toggle to your bar

Run the same line again to update. To remove it:

bash ~/.local/share/facelight/install.sh --uninstall

_{About the bar: Omarchy only loads indicators from the indicators plugin's own folder, so the installer clones omarchy.indicators into ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/ (Omarchy's supported way to customize a built-in widget) and adds facelight to it. From then on, that widget no longer picks up upstream changes. To go back to the stock widget, change <you>.indicators back to omarchy.indicators in ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json.}

Make it yours

facelight toggle            # on/off by hand (a manual "off" lasts until the camera closes)
facelight auto              # back to automatic
facelight status --follow   # {"alt": "on" | "off" | "stopped"}, one line per change

To change the look, run systemctl --user edit facelight.service and override ExecStart:

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=%h/.local/bin/facelight --width 0.8 --color ffe9cc

Option	Default	What it does
--width	0.5	Ring width from 0 to 1 (thickness = w*90 + 10 pt, like macOS)
--color	fff4e5	Tint. The default is a warm white; try ffffff for daylight or ffd9a8 for candle
--brightness	0.95	Ring opacity
--no-cursor-hole	off	Keep the ring solid under the cursor
--on	off	Start lit, without waiting for the camera

Not on Omarchy?

facelight runs on any compositor with wlr-layer-shell (Hyprland, Sway, river, niri, …). Build it with make install, enable it with systemctl --user enable --now facelight.service, and wire facelight status --follow into your bar. Here's a Waybar example:

"custom/facelight": {
  "exec": "facelight status --follow",
  "return-type": "json",
  "format": "💡",
  "on-click": "facelight toggle"
}

The cursor hole uses Hyprland's IPC. On other compositors the ring works without it.

Under the hood

• Camera detection: inotify watches /dev/video* for open and close events. After an event, facelight waits 1 s (browsers briefly open every camera while listing devices), then checks /proc/*/fd to see whether the camera is still in use. It never opens the camera itself.
• Rendering: each monitor gets an overlay wlr-layer-shell surface with an empty input region, backed by a double-buffered wl_shm pool. The ring is computed once as a signed-distance field. While the cursor moves, facelight rewrites only the 720×720 box around the hole.
• Bar: the daemon writes its state to $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/facelight/, and status --follow streams it to the Omarchy indicator over inotify.

Known limits

• The ring shows up in screen shares and screenshots. macOS hides it from capture, and Wayland has no equivalent.
• It doesn't measure your lighting. macOS only turns the light on in a dim room; facelight turns it on whenever the camera is in use.

Credits

The geometry comes from reverse engineering macOS 27's RingLightHelper with rea and Ghidra (notes). No Apple code or binaries are included in this repository. Built for Omarchy.

MIT licensed.