Topframe

Local webpage screen overlay

Customize your computing experience with webdev
Display information and always-on-top widgets
Edit source, hit save, screen will update
Extensible with shell scripts in any language
Less than 400 lines of Go code, minimal deps
Currently alpha, macOS only ...

Getting Started

You can download from Releases or with Homebrew you can:

$ brew install progrium/taps/topframe

If you download a release zip make sure to unzip and put the binary in your PATH (like /usr/local/bin).

$ topframe -h
Usage: topframe <flags>
Topframe is a fullscreen webview overlay agent

Flags:
  -docs       open documentation in browser
  -help       show help
  -plist      generate launch agent plist
  -version    show version

To start it and show the demo webpage overlay, simply run topframe. This will also:

create a ~/.topframe directory with a demo index.html used for the overlay
watch for file changes in ~/.topframe to trigger a page reload
add a menu bar extra (🔲) to control the overlay

If you edit ~/.topframe/index.html and hit save, changes will reflect immediately. If you hate the demo content of the default index.html, change it! Use Show Source from the menu extra to quickly open your topframe directory.

Launching on Startup

Topframe works with launchd to run as a background agent on startup. You can generate an agent plist file with topframe -plist, which you can write to a file in ~/Library/LaunchAgents:

$ topframe -plist > ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.progrium.Topframe.plist

It's a good idea to view the output before writing to the file, just to make sure paths are correct. If you don't know what is correct, it's probably fine!

Documentation

There is not a whole lot to Topframe! I recommend reading the source as its only a few hundred lines, but otherwise there is a wiki ready to document anything else.

Getting Help

If you're having trouble, be sure to check issues to see if its a known issue. Otherwise, feel free to drop a question into the discussion forum.

Contributing

Ideally, Topframe is kept small. Bug fixes and other small PRs are welcome and should be merged quickly. If you happen to have a large PR that we haven't discussed, you should talk about it in the forum first. In order to keep the project small, some features suggestions may be held back in favor of determining a good extension point to expose instead.

About

Topframe started as a 130 line example for progrium/macdriver.

MIT Licensed