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touchless-macLIVE
Control Your Mac With Your Hand: Point, Pinch, Scroll and Wave Through the Built-In Camera
Apple announced its first touchscreen MacBook Pro on 28 October 2026. touchless-mac takes the other road: the Mac you already own watches your hand through its built-in camera and turns what it sees into mouse and keyboard actions. A palm detector finds your hand, a landmark model places 21 points on it, a One Euro filter keeps the cursor steady, and a gesture detector turns pinches and waves into clicks and shortcuts. Nothing leaves the computer. On an Apple M5 Pro, tracking a hand it has already found takes about 1.5 ms, while the camera delivers a frame every 33 ms, so the camera is the slow part. It is air gestures through the camera, not a touchscreen. It is also a beginner Rust tutorial: the full video builds the app from an empty folder, one Rust idea per chapter, and the repository has a git tag for each chapter.
See every gesture
Watch the demo
Install
One line (Apple Silicon, hand models included)
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/qualixar/touchless-mac/main/install.sh | bashtouchless-mac doctortouchless-mac
Or with Homebrew
brew install qualixar/tap/touchless-macOr build it from source, the way the tutorial does
git clone https://github.com/qualixar/touchless-mac.git && cd touchless-macbash scripts/get-models.shcargo run --release
Needs an Apple Silicon Mac with a camera. macOS asks for two permissions for the app you start it from, usually Terminal: Camera, and Accessibility to move the mouse. Run touchless-mac doctor to check both. The build isn't signed by an Apple developer account yet; the installer and Homebrew handle that. Intel Macs are untested: build from source there.
~1.5 ms
Hand tracking (M5 Pro)
~9 ms
Palm search (M5 Pro)
None
Network at run time
MIT
License
Features
Point to Move
The cursor follows your index knuckle, not your fingertip, because the fingertip moves every time you pinch and the knuckle barely does.
Pinch to Click
A thumb-to-index pinch clicks and two quick pinches double-click, decided by the app so the double-click lands even when your pinches are slower than macOS expects.
Right-Click Too
A thumb-to-middle pinch right-clicks, so context menus work without the trackpad.
Scroll With Thumb and Ring
Touch thumb to ring finger and move your hand; the page follows. In recordings of ordinary pointing, two fingers out showed up in up to 82% of frames and thumb-to-ring in under 1%, so it doesn't scroll by accident.
Wave to Switch
An open-hand wave right or left switches apps, and a wave up opens Mission Control.
The Cursor Waits
When your hand leaves the picture, the cursor waits where you left it.
Calibrates to Your Reach
The first run speaks each of the four corners and builds your personal reach box, about 13 seconds; a box that comes out too small is widened so the cursor never gets jumpy.
Setup That Just Works
One command installs it with the hand models included, Homebrew works too, and touchless-mac doctor checks the models, camera and permissions and opens the right System Settings page if one is off.
Learn Rust by Building It
Cargo and crates, struct and let mut, Option, enum and match, Result and the question mark: each idea gives the app one new ability, and the compiler refused the build five times along the way.
Use Cases
Use the Mac without touching it while you cook, eat or have messy hands
Scroll a long document or recipe from across the desk
Open folders and photos with a double pinch during a demo
Learn Rust on a project that does something you can see
Study a real computer-vision pipeline in Rust with ONNX Runtime
Try air-gesture input on the Mac you already own
Licensed under MIT