Winq

Winq is a macOS app that turns your Mac's built-in camera into a hands-free input device. It lives in your menu bar and runs entirely on your Mac. Glance at a display to focus it, wink to click, and raise an eyebrow or make a face to fire a shortcut. Winq is made for people whose hands are busy, including multi-monitor power users, developers and creators, and people who want a lighter alternative on their hands because of RSI or limited hand mobility. It runs on macOS 13 or later on both Apple silicon and Intel Macs, and it needs no hardware beyond the camera your Mac already has. The problem Winq tackles is interruption. Hunting for the window you meant, reaching across displays or grabbing the mouse all pull your hands away from the keyboard, the pen tablet or the instrument you are holding. Winq replaces a few of those small physical actions with signals a camera can read reliably. Rather than acting as a full assistive replacement, it positions itself as a lighter option that works alongside macOS Head Pointer and Voice Control. The distinction from Head Pointer is deliberate: Head Pointer moves a cursor with your head, while Winq jumps focus between displays and windows, clicks with either eye, and runs app-aware shortcuts. Gaze focus is the first of Winq's three inputs. You look at a screen and it becomes focused. Gaze picks a display, or a window, not a pixel: settle on a target for a moment and Winq raises it and puts the pointer where you are looking, so your next keystroke or click lands there. The app describes it as like Command-Tab, but with your eyes. You can switch whole screens, or individual windows and panes when you have two to four big windows per screen. Both your head and your eyes count, so glancing with your eyes alone works too. An optional confirm keeps the target highlighted until you raise your eyebrows, and Winq never switches while you type or use the mouse, and never flickers at the edges. Because you look where you click, every click quietly improves accuracy. Wink clicks are the second input. A left wink is a left click and a right wink is a right click, so the two eyes are separate actions. A normal blink closes both eyes, so it is never treated as a click. Calibration learns how open and closed each of your eyes looks, and Winq keeps learning how far you really wink, even if you cannot wink one eye cleanly. A double wink double-clicks and a long wink drags. Glasses mode reads through reflections and glare. If you cannot wink at all, you can dwell to click by resting the pointer, or pull a mouth corner instead; the mouth pull left and mouth pull right gestures ship unbound and can be tried for left and right click. Face shortcuts are the third input, and Winq ships an eleven-gesture vocabulary that you can rebind. Each gesture can fire a keyboard shortcut, a Shortcuts shortcut, an AppleScript, a shell command or a Winq action, either globally or per app, so a nod can save in your editor and send in your mail app. Thresholds are relative to your own calibrated neutral face, and gestures pause while you are talking unless you turn on arming mode. Per-app profiles exist for your editor, browser, design tool and calls. The default bindings are: eyebrow raise, which also confirms a gaze switch, for Mission Control; head tilt left and right, done as a tilt and back, for previous and next Space; nod for Return; head shake for Escape; holding an open mouth to toggle dictation; holding a smile to take a screenshot to the clipboard; pucker, calibrated to you, to play or pause media; and mouth pull left and right, which are unbound by default. Setup is a dot calibration. A dot glides to a few spots on each of your screens, you follow it the way you normally look, and Winq learns how your head and your eyes move together. It takes about two minutes, and the app keeps learning from every click afterwards. While you calibrate, Winq rests: nothing clicks or switches. If you plug in a new screen, Winq offers to calibrate it from the notch, and a live Try it map shows the screen you are facing before you finish. The notch island shows clicks, gestures and switches briefly around the camera notch, and live view shows exactly what Winq reads from your face, as numbers. Under the hood, the pipeline is deliberately narrow. Frames come from your built-in camera through AVFoundation at up to 1280 by 720 and 15 frames per second. Apple's Vision framework performs on-device machine learning for face landmarks, right on your Mac. Winq's core then applies filters, detectors and your bindings to numbers, not pictures: what moves through the app is a small description of your face per frame, angles and eye openness, never an image. The resulting focus, click or shortcut is delivered through macOS Accessibility. Frames are processed in memory and thrown away, with no cloud, no disk, no account and no uploads, so zero frames are saved to disk or sent anywhere. The only things stored are your settings and calibration: head angles and eye measurements on your Mac, never images. The camera light is honest, and Winq's menu-bar icon shows when it is watching and when it is paused. The camera stops when your Mac locks or sleeps. Every setting lives in a plain config.toml that you can change in the settings window or your own editor. It supports global bindings plus per-app profiles by bundle ID, and every threshold is a setting, including settle time, typing pause and mouse guard. Shift-Command-G toggles Winq instantly from anywhere, and Winq also pauses when your Mac locks or sleeps. For tinkerers, this means the behaviour of gaze, clicks and gestures is fully inspectable and editable as text. The payoff is a lighter workflow. Gaze tracking is accurate enough to pick a display or a large window, which is all Winq asks of it; it does not try to point at pixels, because a webcam cannot do that reliably. Updates are signed and install from inside Winq, and every future update is included. Uninstalling is clean: removing Winq from Settings removes the app, its data and every permission. It works with glasses, and when the picture is too poor to be confident, Winq simply does nothing rather than guess. It asks for two permissions, Camera and Accessibility, each with a stated reason at setup. The scenarios Winq is built around are concrete. Multi-monitor power users stop hunting for the window they meant and simply look at the screen they want before typing. Developers and creators keep their hands on the keyboard, the pen tablet or the instrument while their face handles the switching. For RSI or limited hand mobility, Winq offers a lighter alternative to full assistive setups that works alongside macOS Head Pointer and Voice Control. Day to day, that translates into app-aware gestures: a nod that saves in VS Code, an eyebrow raise for Mission Control, an open mouth to toggle dictation during calls, or a pucker to play and pause media. Winq is a Mac app with one price. You get every feature free for one day from the first launch, with no account and no card. If it earns its place, you buy once: the listed price is $5.66, down from $7.98, described as a first-100 offer at 29 percent off. The licence includes gaze focus, wink clicks and all eleven gestures, every future update, and one Mac per licence, which you can move any time. The licence key arrives by email right away, and a portal is available to find your key again. Winq requires macOS 13 or later. It is not on the Mac App Store because App Store sandboxing restricts the Accessibility control Winq needs, so it ships as a download with automatic updates. In short, Winq turns the camera that is already on your Mac into three new inputs: gaze focus, wink clicks and face shortcuts, all processed on-device and controlled through a plain text config file. Look, wink, done.