LidTap

Tap your MacBook lid. LidTap turns the edges of your MacBook's display into buttons, with no extra hardware. Tap a corner of the screen and it switches desktops, plays your music or hides everything in a meeting.

It works by listening to the motion sensor inside your MacBook. A tap on the lid twists the laptop slightly about its hinge; the sensor feels that twist about 800 times a second, and a small model trained on your taps works out which part of the screen you tapped. Everything runs on your Mac: no account, and your taps and settings never leave the machine. The only time LidTap goes online is to ask GitHub whether a newer version is out (you can turn that off).

Made by Yemcube (@yem.cube).

• What a tap can do
• Profiles: desk, lap, sofa
• Install
• Getting good taps
• Which Macs work
• License
• For developers

What a tap can do

LidTap splits the display into zones: 2×2 by default, or 2×3 and 3×3. Each zone does one thing, and you choose which.

Action	What it does
Desktop Left / Right	Switch to the previous or next desktop (Space)
Play / Pause, Next, Previous	Control whatever is playing: Music, Spotify, YouTube
Volume Up / Down, Mute Sound	Change the volume one step, or mute it, just like the volume keys
New Note	Open a fresh note in Notes
Open App	Launch an app, or bring it to the front if it's already open
Run Shortcut	Run any of your Shortcuts: turn on a Focus, start a timer, message someone, anything Shortcuts can do
Privacy Guard	Mid-meeting and someone walks in? One tap mutes every microphone, turns your meeting camera off (Zoom, Teams, Webex, Google Meet) and hides the screen. Tap again or click to come back, with your mic restored exactly as it was

The default 2×2 layout: top-left Desktop Left, top-right Desktop Right, bottom-left Play / Pause, bottom-right Privacy Guard.

LidTap ignores the bumps that aren't taps: typing, clicking, scrolling, moving the pointer, moving the lid, and knocks on the desk.

Profiles: desk, lap, sofa

A tap feels different on a desk, on your lap and on a sofa. Profiles let each place have its own calibration, zone actions and sensitivity: say Desk switches desktops, and Sofa plays and pauses music.

LidTap starts with no profiles. To add one, open Settings → Profiles and click Add Profile…. Name it, pick an icon, and either calibrate on the new surface (recommended, about two minutes) or start with a copy of your current calibration. What you set up before is kept as Default, and you can rename it.

Once you have two or more, switch between them at the top of the LidTap menu, or press ⌘1 to ⌘9 while the menu is open. Privacy Guard, feedback, sounds and update settings are shared by all profiles.

Install

1. Download LidTap-macOS.zip from the latest release.
2. Unzip it, drag LidTap.app to Applications and open it. It's signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens like any other app.
3. A hand icon appears in the menu bar, and Settings opens.
4. Allow Accessibility when asked (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility). Desktop switching and music keys need it. Input Monitoring is optional: it lets LidTap tell typing from tapping more precisely.
5. Click Calibrate. Tap the dot in each highlighted zone a few times (about two minutes), then let it record 20 seconds of everyday bumps: typing, clicking, nudging the laptop. That's it.

Updating: from 1.0.2 on, LidTap updates itself. About once a day it checks GitHub for a new release and asks before installing it; or click Check Now in Settings → General. It installs an update only if it's signed by LidTap's developer, and keeps your calibration and settings. Turn off the daily check in Settings → General. On 1.0.1 or earlier, download the new version once and replace the app in Applications. Coming from 1.0 or an unsigned build? Switch LidTap off and on again in the Accessibility list, once.

Getting good taps

• A quick, light flick with a fingertip on the dot near each zone's corner. Never press hard: you don't need force, and pressing on a display can leave marks.
• Wait for the screen to settle between taps (about half a second).
• During calibration the meter says Good tap, A little crisper or Gentler is fine. Aim for green.
• Too many misreads? Settings → Training shows how reliable each zone is; Calibrate Again adds taps where they're needed.
• Taps refused as "Too soft"? A screen tap moves a larger, heavier MacBook less (a 16" MacBook Pro twists a half to a third as much as a 13" MacBook Air), so LidTap learns how hard taps land on your Mac from your calibration taps. To set the limit by hand, turn off Learn tap strength from my taps in Settings → Detection.

With crisp taps on a 2×2 grid, LidTap read 95% of taps correctly in our testing. Taps it isn't sure about are ignored rather than guessed.

Which Macs work

• An Apple Silicon MacBook with the motion sensor: MacBook Air or Pro with M2 or later, or the 14"/16" MacBook Pro with M1 Pro or M1 Max.
• Not the M1 MacBook Air, the 13" M1 MacBook Pro, desktop Macs or Intel Macs: they have no motion sensor.
• macOS 14 Sonoma or later.

LidTap reads a sensor Apple doesn't document, so a future macOS update could change or break it.

License

Free to use, change, tinker with and share under the LidTap License: MIT, plus two rules.

1. If you share anything built on LidTap publicly (an app, a fork, a video or post showing your work), credit "Based on LidTap by Yemcube" with a link to Instagram @yem.cube. Private use needs no credit.
2. Commercial use needs approval first. Selling it, putting it in a paid product or service, or using it in a company's products or advertising: message @yem.cube on Instagram.

LidTap is not affiliated with or endorsed by Apple.

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For developers

Folder	What's in it
LidTapApp/	The macOS menu bar app (Swift, SwiftUI) and its tests. Start with its README
lidtap/, PROTOTYPE.md	The original Python prototype: a browser GUI with live sensor traces, calibration and model comparison
LidTap.md	How the detection and recognition work, end to end
reports/, research_notes/	The research behind the approach: sensor access, prior art, signal processing and ML
tools/imu_probe.py	A minimal probe that reads the motion and lid-angle sensors

Build the app (needs the Xcode Command Line Tools):

LidTapApp/scripts/build.sh

It compiles with swiftc, assembles LidTapApp/build/LidTap.app, signs it ad hoc with the Hardened Runtime and installs it to ~/Applications. --no-install skips the install.

Make a release signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple (the setup steps are at the top of the script):

LidTapApp/scripts/release.sh

Bump CFBundleShortVersionString in LidTapApp/Resources/Info.plist first, then publish a GitHub release tagged v<version> with LidTap-macOS.zip attached. Installed copies find it through GitHub's latest-release API (drafts and pre-releases are ignored), show its notes, and install it only if it's newer and signed with the same Developer ID (Team 23R7L2SQ34).

Run the tests:

LidTapApp/scripts/test.sh

That runs the ML, detector, app-logic and UI suites with no side effects. The Python prototype has its own hardware-free tests: python -m unittest tests.test_prototype from the repo root. hardware, actions, guard and e2e suites drive the real system (switch Spaces, mute the mic, open apps), so run them only when you aren't using the Mac.

How it works, briefly: the app reads the accelerometer and gyroscope through IOKit HID (AppleSPUHIDDevice, ~800 Hz), high-pass filters the gyro, and triggers on an adaptive threshold. Each tap becomes a 200 ms window and 70 features (shape, timing, axis ratios and a resampled template), classified by a k-nearest-neighbours, logistic-regression or nearest-centroid model, whichever cross-validates best on your own data. Taps far from anything it has learned, or below its confidence floor, are rejected. Credit for the sensor work goes to yamete, apple-silicon-accelerometer and LidAngleSensor; see reports/ for the full list.