Glance

Glance composes widgets on a Framework Laptop 16 LED Matrix. Preview the 9×34 output in a terminal editor, position widgets without overlap, save JSON layouts, and play them on a device with or without the TUI.

The catalog includes Snake, Ledris, Pong, Game of Life, clocks (including a compact seven-segment clock), computer CPU/RAM statistics, equalizer, breathing, WPM and configurable progress bars. Progress bars consume values from periodically read files with JSON Pointer/regex masks, or from one shared Axum JSON-RPC server.

Getting started

Install Rust 1.95 or newer, just, and your system's serial dependencies (libudev-dev on Ubuntu; libudev and pkg-config on Arch). This workspace builds directly for your computer's native target.

Install on Linux or macOS

The installer builds from source and installs inputmodule-tui and inputmodule-control into ~/.local/bin. Rust and the dependencies above must already be installed; macOS also needs the Xcode Command Line Tools.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/iltumio/glance/main/install.sh | bash
inputmodule-tui --no-device

From a local checkout, run ./install.sh. Choose another installation prefix with ./install.sh --prefix /path/to/prefix; executables go into its bin directory. The installer prints a PATH command if that directory is not already on your PATH.

Run from a checkout

just demo
just tui --serial-dev /dev/ttyACM0
just devices
just demo --template inputmodule-tui/templates/progress.json
just template inputmodule-tui/templates/progress.json --serial-dev /dev/ttyACM0

The editor needs a terminal of at least 64×24. Enter adds/positions a widget, Tab switches lists, e configures a placed progress bar, s saves, and q exits. The complete guide covers keyboard/mouse controls, template validation, file inputs, JSON-RPC methods and reconnection behavior.

Plain Cargo also works:

cargo run -- --no-device
cargo build --locked --workspace
cargo test --locked --workspace

The inputmodule-control binary provides the original hardware control commands:

just control --help

Linux device permissions

The original udev rules are included in release/50-framework-inputmodule.rules. Install them once, then reconnect the module:

sudo install -m 0644 release/50-framework-inputmodule.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/
sudo udevadm control --reload-rules

Workspace

Crate	Responsibility
inputmodule-tui	Widget editor, rendering, JSON templates, inputs, JSON-RPC server and device connection
inputmodule-control	Hardware control CLI
inputmodule-host	Shared protocol constants/encoding, monochrome grid and fonts

Verification

just check
just smoke

check runs formatting, Clippy and tests for all three crates. The four Linux smoke suites exercise real terminal lifecycle, editor configuration/save/load, file polling, the HTTP JSON-RPC endpoint, simulated serial output, signal shutdown and reconnects. CI runs desktop checks on Linux, Windows and macOS, with integration checks on Linux. The Build workflow runs on every push and pull request, and can also be started manually. Each run provides downloadable release binaries for Linux, Windows and macOS.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Framework and the contributors to FrameworkComputer/inputmodule-rs for making their Input Module software and firmware available under the MIT License. Their work provides the foundation for Glance's device support.

inputmodule-host bundles shared code extracted and adapted from that repository, including protocol constants and encoding, monochrome frames and fonts. We include it locally because upstream does not provide a dedicated reusable Rust crate for host applications.

Glance is licensed under the MIT License. The original Framework copyright notice is retained.