kPad

Turn any device into a trackpad, keyboard, and remote for your Mac
— over your local network, with nothing to install on the phone.

by Kailaba

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Run one small menu-bar app on your Mac, open the shown URL (or scan the QR) in your phone's browser, and your phone becomes a precise trackpad + keyboard + media remote. No App Store, no account, no cloud — everything stays on your LAN.

Why kPad

Most "phone as mouse" tools make you install an app on both the computer and the phone, and many route your input through their servers. kPad is deliberately smaller:

	kPad	Typical alternatives
Install on phone	❌ none — just a browser	✅ app required (App Store / Play)
Install on Mac	✅ one tiny menu-bar app	✅ app required
Cloud / account	❌ never — 100% local LAN	⚠️ often cloud relay + sign-in
Works offline	✅ even over a phone hotspot	⚠️ frequently needs internet
Cost / source	✅ free & open-source	⚠️ freemium / closed

• Fully local. No relay server, no account, no telemetry, no WebRTC. Your input never leaves your network. Works with zero internet — connect the Mac to your phone's hotspot and it still works.
• Zero-install phone side. Any phone or tablet with a modern browser: iOS Safari, Android Chrome. Nothing to update or trust on the device.
• Connect in seconds. Same Wi-Fi → scan the QR → you're driving the Mac.

Features

• Trackpad — smooth pointer with tunable acceleration, tap to click, two-finger tap = right-click, two-finger scroll with inertia, and tap-and-a-half drag-lock. Multi-monitor aware.
• Keyboard — type with the phone's own keyboard, voice dictation via its mic, special keys (Esc/Tab/⌫/Return/arrows), and sticky ⌘⌃⌥⇧ combos.
• Clipboard sync, both directions.
• Media keys — play/pause, prev/next, volume, mute, brightness.
• Secure enough for a LAN — a 6-digit pairing code (embedded in the QR); paired devices are remembered so they never re-prompt.

Quick start

1. Install the Mac app. Grab the latest kPad.dmg from Releases, open it, and drag kPad onto Applications. Launch it — it lives in the menu bar. (Or run from source — see Development.)
2. Grant Accessibility once (the menu's "Grant Accessibility" item). macOS requires this to move the cursor and type.
3. On your phone (same Wi-Fi): open the menu's Show QR code and scan it, or type the shown URL. Enter the 6-digit code the first time — that's it.

First launch blocked? The build is ad-hoc signed (free & open-source, not notarized), so macOS says "Apple could not verify…". Open it via System Settings → Privacy & Security → scroll down → Open Anyway, or run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/kPad.app". (Building locally with make dmg isn't quarantined, so it opens without this.)

Always-on: System Settings → General → Login Items → add kPad.

No internet? Use a hotspot

No Wi-Fi anywhere? Turn on your phone's personal hotspot, connect the Mac to it, and open the URL — the two devices share the hotspot LAN, so everything works with no internet at all.

Privacy & security

• LAN only. Input goes directly from your phone to your Mac over your local network — never to any third party.
• The only access control is the pairing code/token; that's intentional and appropriate for a same-network personal tool. Don't expose the port to the public internet.

Development

Requires macOS 13+ and Python 3.12. The phone client is vanilla HTML/CSS/JS — no build step.

make run     # dev server (run from a terminal that has Accessibility granted)
make app     # a dev kPad.app you can grant Accessibility to directly
make dmg     # build the self-contained, installable kPad.app + .dmg
make proto   # regenerate web/protocol.js from server/protocol.py

The Mac side is a single Python process: aiohttp serves the client and a WebSocket on one port, input is synthesized via pyobjc/Quartz CGEvent, and the menu bar is rumps. The wire protocol lives in one place — server/protocol.py — and make proto regenerates the client's web/protocol.js mirror so the two sides can never drift. Icons are generated by scripts/gen_icon.py.

Building requires a Mac. PyInstaller doesn't cross-compile and the app uses macOS-only frameworks + codesign/hdiutil, so a .dmg cannot be built on Linux/Raspberry Pi — build locally on a Mac or on a macOS CI runner.

Releases are built and published automatically by GitHub Actions on a macos runner when a v* tag is pushed (see .github/workflows/release.yml).

Roadmap

• User-editable shortcut grid (JSON-defined).
• App-aware layouts: the Mac detects the frontmost app and the phone swaps its controls (Keynote → slide controls, video → scrub bar, …). The protocol already reserves a layout-hint message for this.

License

MIT © Kailaba — see LICENSE.