/blockout

Focus on the details

Primary LanguageC++MIT LicenseMIT

Blockout

An overlay tool for blacking out regions of a screen.

Archived 2023.09.07

Power Toys has a nifty new feature called crop & lock that is better and easier to use.

Use Case

While working with tables of dense data, my eyes sometimes wander which makes reading at a glance a challenge. The idea is to provide a black overlay that allows the user to click and draw a transparent hole through which interesting data can be viewed.

demo

Usage

Blockout can be run in two ways. The easy way is to launch from the CLI with the name of your target application as the first parameter.

blockout firefox.exe

This will keep the overlay exactly over your Firefox browser and tracker its movement and resizing.

Alternatively, you may launch without any parmeters and fiddle with the location yourself.

Improvements

  • Make it easier to draw the initial hole
  • Support multiple holes
  • Automatically track an underlay window
  • Support targeting a process at runtime (instead of launch)