EdgePad

Trackpad-edge controls for macOS.
Scrub media, adjust volume and brightness, and pan scrollable content without leaving the trackpad.

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EdgePad turns the edges of a Mac trackpad into lightweight system controls. Drag the top edge to scrub media, the left edge to adjust volume, the right edge to adjust brightness or scroll vertically, and the bottom edge to scroll horizontally when the active mode allows it.

It is a native Swift menu-bar app. It reads raw trackpad contact data, classifies intentional edge drags, and sends the matching system action to macOS or the focused app.

What It Does

Edge	Auto mode	Media mode	Reading mode
Top	Media scrub when EdgePad detects media context	Media scrub	Media scrub
Left	Volume	Volume	Volume
Right	Brightness in media context, vertical scroll elsewhere	Brightness	Vertical scroll
Bottom	Horizontal scroll outside media context	Disabled	Horizontal scroll

Auto mode is the default behavior in the current app. It uses the frontmost app, browser window title, recent clicks on video elements, CoreAudio activity, and accessibility information to decide whether an edge should act like a media control or a scroll control.

Features

• Top-edge media scrubbing - works wherever the focused player binds left/right arrow keys to small playhead seeks: (e.g. YouTube, Tubi, Discord). Players that don't bind arrow-key seek won't respond — EdgePad is sending arrow keypresses. For Apple Music / Podcasts / Apple TV / Spotify (which ignore arrow keys), it falls back to MediaRemote skip-15 commands; an accessibility slider drag is used on top if the page exposes one.
• Left-edge volume control - reads and writes the default output device through CoreAudio.
• Right-edge brightness control - uses macOS DisplayServices at runtime for built-in display brightness.
• Reading mode - swaps the right edge from brightness to vertical scrolling and enables bottom-edge horizontal scrolling.
• Horizontal and vertical scrolling - posts pixel-based scroll events with velocity amplification, sub-pixel accumulation, and momentum.
• Native macOS HUDs - volume and brightness call the system OSD manager instead of drawing a clone.
• Scrub overlay - media scrubbing gets a small click-through overlay for feedback.
• Typing and palm rejection - suppresses new edge gestures shortly after typing and rejects obvious palm contacts.
• Adjustable sensitivity - tune global sensitivity, individual action sensitivity, and edge-zone size from the menu-bar menu.
• No bundled network code - the current source tree contains no telemetry, analytics, or updater network calls.

System Requirements

• macOS 13 Ventura or later
• Swift 6.0 or later
• Xcode Command Line Tools or Xcode 16+
• A Mac trackpad device exposed through Apple's multitouch framework
• Accessibility permission for keyboard and scroll event posting

EdgePad uses private Apple frameworks for raw multitouch capture, brightness, MediaRemote commands, and native HUD display. Those frameworks are loaded dynamically at runtime, so the app can fail gracefully if a future macOS release changes one of them.

Installation

Option 1 (recommended): Install via curl

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/forkiron/EdgePad/main/install.sh | bash

This downloads the latest release, installs it to /Applications, and launches it. No Gatekeeper warning, no first-launch dance — see "About the install methods" below for why.

After EdgePad opens, grant Accessibility permission when prompted, in System Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Accessibility.

Option 2: Download the .zip directly

Download EdgePad-x.y.z.zip from GitHub Releases, unzip it, and move EdgePad.app into /Applications.

⚠ Browser-downloaded apps trigger a Gatekeeper warning. macOS marks every browser download as quarantined, and because the released binary is ad-hoc signed (not Developer ID signed), the warning will block the app from opening on first launch. You'll need to bypass it once.

To bypass after a browser download, run:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/EdgePad.app

Or via System Settings: open System Settings -> Privacy & Security, scroll to the banner that says "EdgePad was blocked from use…", click Open Anyway, then re-launch and click Open in the new dialog.

The curl install in Option 1 avoids this entirely.

About the install methods

The Gatekeeper warning is triggered by an extended attribute (com.apple.quarantine) that browsers attach to downloads. curl, wget, and git don't set it, so an app fetched via the install script bypasses Gatekeeper without any signing change. This is the same mechanism Homebrew, Rust (rustup), Bun, and Deno use for their installers.

The released binary is currently ad-hoc signed rather than signed with an Apple Developer ID. This is a signing status, not a malware indicator:

• EdgePad is open source (MIT). The full source tree of every release is in this repository, and you can rebuild the same binary yourself with ./build.sh.
• The current source tree contains no telemetry, analytics, or auto-update network calls.
• Future versions are expected to be Developer ID signed and notarized by Apple, at which point both install paths will be warning-free.

Option 3: Build from source

git clone https://github.com/forkiron/EdgePad.git
cd EdgePad
./build.sh

The build script creates:

build/EdgePad.app

To build and launch in one step:

./build.sh run

For foreground development logs:

./build.sh dev

On first launch, grant Accessibility permission in:

System Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Accessibility

If macOS blocks the locally built app because it is ad-hoc signed, remove the quarantine flag after building:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine build/EdgePad.app

To produce a distributable zip for upload to a release, run:

./package.sh

This produces build/EdgePad-<version>.zip, ad-hoc signed, ready to attach to a GitHub release.

Optional: run scripts/codesign/setup_local.sh once on macOS to create a local development signing identity used by build.sh.

Usage

1. Launch build/EdgePad.app.
2. Open the EdgePad menu-bar item.
3. Choose Auto, Media, or Reading.
4. Adjust sensitivity or edge-zone size if the default 10% edge strip feels too narrow or too wide.
5. Drag along a trackpad edge.

Use Media when you want fixed media controls: top scrub, left volume, right brightness. Use Reading when you are working with zoomed pages, PDFs, wide documents, timelines, or canvases and want right-edge vertical scroll plus bottom-edge horizontal scroll. Use Auto when you want EdgePad to switch between those behaviors based on context.

How It Works

EdgePad is organized around a small input pipeline:

Component	Role
MultitouchCapture	Loads MultitouchSupport.framework, enumerates real trackpad-sized devices, and streams contact samples.
EdgeDetector	Classifies edge touches, waits for a dead zone, rejects likely palm/navigation gestures, and emits drag events.
ContextDetector	Resolves Auto mode by inspecting the frontmost app, browser media hints, click targets, audio activity, and scrollability.
MediaController	Scrubs with accessibility sliders, MediaRemote skip commands, or arrow-key events.
VolumeController	Reads and writes output volume through CoreAudio.
BrightnessController	Reads and writes display brightness through DisplayServices.
ScrollController	Posts horizontal or vertical pixel scroll events with momentum.
NativeHUD	Shows the real macOS volume and brightness HUD through OSD.framework.

The Swift package has one executable target, EdgePad.

Development

Build:

./build.sh

Run:

./build.sh run

Clean:

./build.sh clean

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. For setup steps, review expectations, and project boundaries, see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Acknowledgements

EdgePad reads raw trackpad contacts via MultitouchSupport.framework, an undocumented Apple private framework. The API surface used here — MTDeviceCreateList, MTRegisterContactFrameCallback, the contact-sample struct layout, and the family-ID heuristics that pick the real trackpad over auxiliary sensors — comes from years of community reverse-engineering. Thanks to everyone who has published findings about it.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.