lightup

Turn your laptop screen into a bright flashlight with funky animated pastel borders!

Perfect for when you need emergency lighting and your phone is dead, or you just want a cool fullscreen light effect.

Features

• Fullscreen bright display - Maximum brightness white (or colored) screen
• Animated pastel border - Moving pink and blue pixels around the edges
• Color options - White, red, or amber/orange modes
• Hidden cursor - Clean fullscreen experience
• Low CPU usage - Efficient 30 FPS rendering
• Keyboard shortcuts - Easy exit with ESC or Q
• Cross-platform - Works on Linux (X11/Wayland)

Installation

Quick Install (Recommended)

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/lightup
cd lightup
./install.sh

The installer will:

• Build the binary
• Ask if you want user install or system-wide install
• Automatically configure your PATH if needed

From crates.io (once published)

cargo install lightup

Manual Build

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/lightup
cd lightup
cargo build --release
./target/release/lightup

Uninstall

./uninstall.sh

Or manually:

cargo uninstall lightup  # if installed via cargo
rm ~/.cargo/bin/lightup  # if user install
sudo rm /usr/local/bin/lightup  # if system install

Usage

Basic usage (white flashlight)

lightup

Colored flashlight

# Red flashlight
lightup --color red

# Amber/orange flashlight
lightup --color amber

Exit

Press ESC or Q to exit the flashlight.

Requirements

• Rust 1.70+ (for building from source)
• Linux with X11 or Wayland support
• Tested on Fedora 42

How It Works

The application creates a borderless fullscreen window and fills it with your chosen color. An animated border of alternating pastel pink and blue pixels moves around the edges at 30 FPS. The cursor is automatically hidden for a clean look.

Performance

• Binary size: ~2.1MB (stripped release build)
• Startup time: <100ms
• CPU usage: Minimal (~1-2% on modern systems)
• Memory usage: <10MB

License

Licensed under either of:

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open issues or submit pull requests.

Acknowledgments

Built with:

• winit - Cross-platform window creation
• softbuffer - Software buffer rendering