Overlej

A desktop application that lets you overlay images on all your workspaces.

Features

• It lets you choose an image, and choose an opacity level.
• It also makes sure to render the overlay on all desktops/workspaces.
• Cross platform***

*** maybe, I have only tested on macOS. Window managers are hard, so who knows what this looks like on linus or bill OS

Screenshots

Image selection, an overlay, multi workspace example.

Installation

Do you trust me? Do I trust me? Do you want to play the "execute 45mb of arbitrary code" game?

Yes

Install the app from the releases page. Then do the right-click -> open trick, because I haven't signed it.

No

Build it from source.

Clone the repo:

git clone git@github.com:22a/overlej.git

Install deps:

yarn

Then, either

• Run locally:

yarn start

or

• Build it yourself:

yarn build

Why?

I'm not certain why other people use apps like these, but I was in the market for one because I got a fancy new keyboard and I couldn't remember my key layout so I wanted to be able to see it, with my eyes, all the time. There are a handful of apps like this out there - Overlay2, Glueprint, LayerX, etc - but none of them were both free and allowed me to have the image be displayed on ALL workspaces. I was happy with Glueprint but got lost and confused and ashamed when I would swap workspaces and forget where my keys were.

Learney Nuggets

I had never packaged an electron app before and didn't know how to make the .icns and .ico files I needed. Follow me and I'll teach you how:

1. Have a high res png of your icon at hand
2. Install Prepo
3. Drag your png into it and export a .Iconset directory, foo.Iconset for example

• iconutil didn't like the uppercase filenames prepo generated so I ran find path/to/foo.Iconset -depth -exec rename -f 's/(.*)\/([^\/]*)/$1\/\L$2/' {} \; to help it along

5. Use iconutil to make your .icns: iconutil -c icns path/to/foo.Iconset, this will drop a foo.icns in the same directory as your iconset
6. Windows wants a .ico so I put my png in an online conversion thingy
7. Then I put both my .icns and .ico into the build directory and let Electron Builder fandangle the slurpenstein