augenblick

Reminds you to blink. At regular intervals, it closes your screen like an eyelid — two black bars sweep in from the top and bottom and meet in the middle, then open again — so you rest your eyes.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/5b0d6ae7-d471-4bfc-916b-0549f1a7d788

Usage

augenblick

Blinks once at startup, then every 4 minutes.

Options:
  -c <path>               config file (default: ~/.config/augenblick/augenblick.toml)
  -n <n>                  number of blinks, then exit (default: run forever)
  --sleep_secs <n>        seconds between blinks (default: 240)
  --animation_frames <n>  frames per eyelid sweep (default: 20)
  --color <hex>           eyelid color, e.g. #ff0000 (default: #000000);
                          repeatable, each blink picks one at random
  -V, --version           print version
  -h, --help              show this help

Installation

NixOS / Nix — NUR

Add the NUR channel if you haven't already:

nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/NUR/archive/master.tar.gz nur
nix-channel --update

Then install:

# configuration.nix
environment.systemPackages = [
  nur.repos.x71c9.augenblick
];

Or ad-hoc:

nix-env -f '<nixpkgs>' -iA nur.repos.x71c9.augenblick

Linux — AUR (Arch Linux)

Build from source:

yay -S augenblick

Or prebuilt binary:

yay -S augenblick-bin

crates.io — Cargo

cargo install augenblick

macOS — Homebrew

brew install x71c9/x71c9/augenblick

Pre-built binaries

Download the latest release for your platform from the releases page.

Config

~/.config/augenblick/augenblick.toml (all fields optional):

sleep_secs = 240
animation_frames = 20
color = "#000000"

CLI flags override config file values.

color also accepts an array. Each blink then picks one of the colors at random:

color = ["#cc241d", "#98971a", "#d79921", "#458588", "#b16286", "#689d6a"]

On the command line, --color can be repeated for the same effect:

augenblick --color '#cc241d' --color '#458588'

augenblick does not read colors from the desktop theme. To match a rice, the theming tool (pywal templates, Stylix, home-manager, …) generates augenblick.toml with the palette.

Requirements

Linux: X11 with libxcb installed.

macOS: XQuartz must be installed and running. Launch it before running augenblick:

open -a XQuartz
DISPLAY=:0 augenblick