monolens

Show part of your screen in 8-bit grayscale.

Usage

Install with pip install monolens. Then run monolens in a terminal on the screen that you want to look at.

• Drag the lens around by holding a Mouse button down inside the window
• Resize the lens by pressing up, down, left, right
• To refresh the lens press the spacebar (see limitations)
• To quit, press Q

Known limitations

• The app currently only works smoothly on OSX, it glitches on Linux.
• Pulling the window to another screen is currently not supported. To switch screens, you need to run monolens from a terminal on that screen. This limitation will hopefully be lifted in the future.
• The lens uses a static screenshot which has to be manually updated if the screen content changed. Press spacebar to update the lens (which causes it to flicker).
• On OSX, you need to give monolens permission to make screenshots, since an ordinary App is not allowed to read pixels outside of its window for security reasons. monolens is safe to use because it has no networking code implemented at all.

For developers

• One can run monolens without installing it from the project folder via python -m monolens. You need to install pyside6 manually then.