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. A fill movement covers the whole screen at once instead of sweeping.

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
  --movement <name>       blink: lids sweep in from top and bottom (default);
                          fill: the whole screen is covered at once, no sweep
  --fade <ms>             fade in and out over this many milliseconds (default: 0, off)
  --hold <ms>             time the screen stays fully covered
                          (default: 150 for blink, the length of a blink for fill)
  -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"
movement = "blink"
fade = 0
hold = 150

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'

movement selects how the screen is covered:

• blink (default): two lids sweep in from the top and bottom edges, meet in the middle, pause, then sweep back out.
• fill: the whole screen is covered with the color at once, held, then uncovered. No sweep.

movement = "fill"

augenblick --movement fill

hold sets how long the screen stays fully covered, in milliseconds. With blink it is the pause between the closing and the opening sweep, 150 ms by default. With fill it is the whole covered time; when unset it lasts as long as a full blink would with the same animation_frames, about 800 ms with the defaults.

movement = "fill"
hold = 2000

augenblick --movement fill --hold 2000

fade fades the overlay in and out over the given number of milliseconds. With fill, the fade-in runs before the hold and the fade-out after it, so the screen stays covered for hold plus twice fade. With blink, the opacity ramps up during the first fade ms of the sweep and down during the last fade ms. Zero (the default) disables fading.

fade = 300

augenblick --movement fill --fade 300

No compositor is needed. On X11 the screen is snapshotted before the overlay appears and the color is blended over that snapshot with XRender, so the content under the overlay is frozen for the duration of the blink. On Wayland the overlay is drawn with real alpha.

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