Touch Bar Enhancer 🎛️✨

Touch Bar Enhancer is a simple Touch Bar configurator for Linux, designed specifically for Apple MacBook Pro laptops equipped with a Touch Bar running Linux (T2 Macs).

It provides an intuitive graphical interface to configure layouts, map functions, and deploy settings directly to tiny-dfr, the underlying daemon responsible for rendering the Touch Bar on Linux.

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🚀 Features

• Visual Layout Editor: Easily add, arrange, and remove Touch Bar buttons visually.
• Dual Layout Support: Configure separate layouts for standard Function Keys (F1-F12) and Media Keys.
• CupertinoIcons Integration: Natively maps Apple's Cupertino icons to rasterized PNGs automatically, ensuring a native macOS look and feel.
• Hardware Toggles: Control critical Touch Bar features such as:
  • Show Button Outlines: Toggle visual borders around touch targets.
  • Enable Pixel Shift: Hardware burn-in protection for the OLED display.
  • Adaptive Brightness: Use the ambient light sensor to adjust Touch Bar brightness.
• One-Click Deployment: Generates config.toml, handles required PNG icon rendering, and automatically restarts the tiny-dfr daemon via pkexec (PolicyKit).

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🛠️ Technology Stack

Touch Bar Enhancer is built using Python and frameworks:

• Python (>= 3.10): Core programming language.
• PyQt6: The foundation of the graphical user interface, utilizing the modern Fusion style and Wayland support.
• uv: Used for extremely fast dependency management and environment isolation.
• tiny-dfr: The system-level Rust daemon that interfaces with the Touch Bar hardware. This application acts as a high-level frontend for it.
• CupertinoIcons: Embedded TrueType font utilized dynamically to render high-quality PNG icons for tiny-dfr on the fly.

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📦 Installation & Usage

Prerequisites

1. You must have a compatible MacBook Pro running Linux (T2 Mac).
2. Ensure tiny-dfr is installed and enabled on your system (systemctl status tiny-dfr).
3. Ensure pkexec (PolicyKit) is installed, as it is required to deploy configurations to system directories (/etc/ and /var/lib/).

Setup

Clone the repository and run the application using uv:

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/julienbelanger1/T2Linux-Touchbar-Enhancer.git
cd T2Linux-Touchbar-Enhancer

# Run the app directly using uv (it will handle dependencies)
uv run python -m touchbar_enhancer

How to Use

1. Select Layout: Choose between editing the F1-F12 layout or the Media Keys layout using the top toggle.
2. Add Buttons: Click items in the Toolbox (right pane) to add them to your active layout.
3. Remove Buttons: Click any button on the Active Layout preview (left pane) to remove it.
4. Adjust Settings: Toggle Pixel Shift, Adaptive Brightness, and Outlines.
5. Deploy: Click Deploy to Touchbar. You will be prompted for your user password via pkexec to apply the system-wide systemd and tiny-dfr configurations.

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⚠️ Current Status: What Works vs. What Doesn't

✅ What Works

• Graphical GUI & Previews: The PyQt6 UI successfully renders your layout exactly as it will appear.
• Icon Generation: Translating vector CupertinoIcons fonts into static PNGs for tiny-dfr works flawlessly.
• Daemon Management: Safely injecting a systemd drop-in configuration and restarting the tiny-dfr service without manual terminal intervention.
• Settings Persistence: User configurations are successfully backed up to ~/.config/touchbar-enhancer/config.toml and /var/lib/touchbar-enhancer/.

❌ What Doesn't (Known Limitations)

• Drag-and-Drop Reordering: Currently, you cannot drag items to rearrange them in the active layout. You must remove and re-add them in the correct order.
• Custom SVGs: Importing arbitrary .svg or .png files from the filesystem is not fully wired up yet; you are limited to the embedded PRESETS and Cupertino icons.
• Non-systemd Init Systems: The deploy script relies entirely on systemd drop-ins. Systems using OpenRC, runit, or dinit will need to apply the generated /etc/tiny-dfr/config.toml manually.
• Wayland pkexec GUI Prompt: Depending on your Wayland compositor, pkexec might fallback to the terminal or fail if a graphical authentication agent (like polkit-kde-agent or polkit-gnome) isn't running.

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🔮 Potential Improvements & Roadmap

If you wish to contribute, the following features would be excellent additions:

1. Drag-and-Drop Architecture: Refactor the QBoxLayout preview to a list widget or custom canvas that supports Qt Drag & Drop events.
2. Custom Icon Importer: A file picker dialog allowing users to upload their own .png or .svg icons, copy them to /var/lib/touchbar-enhancer/icons, and append them to the toolbox.
3. Multi-Profile Support: Allow users to save and load different "Layout Profiles" (e.g., "Developer", "Media Editing", "Minimalist") to disk.
4. Standalone AppImage / Flatpak: Package the application so users don't need Python or uv installed, easing distribution across Fedora, Arch, and Ubuntu.
5. Polkit Integration Alternative: Replace pkexec shell scripts with a native DBus interface or sudo fallback to improve compatibility across different desktop environments.

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📝 License

This project is open-source. MIT License.

If you appreciate my work, feel free to buy me a coffee :) Thanks!