TouchLink is the control-surface lane of AIM — RQ MCP LLC's local-first AI operator stack — and a standalone macOS driver in its own right.

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virtual touchscreen driver · standalone or in a stack

Touch that lands where you tap.

Mac has never really handled USB touchscreens — plug one in and your taps land in the wrong spot, or just move the pointer instead of pressing the button. TouchLink is a virtual touchscreen driver for Mac. On its own, it makes touch behave like touch — your touchscreen works like a touchscreen, and your mouse stays a mouse. And because it's a virtual driver, it also folds into a larger stack as a programmable control surface — the way AIM uses it.

A working prototype, verified on real hardware. Distribution packaging comes next. macOS 13+.
01 / THE PROBLEM

macOS has no good answer for USB touchscreens.

Plug a touchscreen into a Mac and it mostly doesn't behave — your taps land on the wrong screen, in the wrong place, or just move the pointer. macOS treats a touchscreen as a mouse; TouchLink makes it behave like a touchscreen.

Calibrated to your screen

A quick, guided four-corner tap teaches TouchLink your exact panel and layout — so from then on, your touch lands on the right spot, every time.

4-point matrix

No kernel hacks

TouchLink runs as a menu-bar app on public macOS frameworks — IOHIDManager and a CGEvent tap. No kernel extension to break on an OS update.

IOHIDManager · CGEvent

Right screen, every time

It corrects events for the specific display you've bound the touchscreen to, leaving your other screens untouched. The right surface gets the touch.

display-bound
02 / HOW IT WORKS

Catch the wrong tap. Post the right one.

TouchLink watches the raw HID stream, recognises the miscalibrated event, applies your calibration, and returns a corrected native event — all on-device.

STAGE 01

Monitor

Reads raw USB touchscreen HID reports through IOHIDManager.

STAGE 02

Match

A CGEvent tap catches the miscalibrated pointer event macOS generated.

STAGE 03

Correct

Applies your per-device 4-point calibration matrix to the coordinates.

STAGE 04

Post

Returns the corrected event to the stream — the tap lands exactly where you touched.

On-device, by construction. Everything happens locally on your Mac through public frameworks. TouchLink needs Input Monitoring and Accessibility permission to read raw HID and post corrected events — and nothing else.
03 / IN THE AIM STACK

The same primitive, as a control surface.

Inside AIM, TouchLink is the pattern for turning a physical touchscreen into a safe driver of a virtual workspace — under the same bounded-autonomy rules as the rest of the stack.

ROLE_01

Observer-first

By default it observes and transforms coordinates — metadata only. No synthetic input is injected and no drivers are mutated without an explicit, approved step.

ROLE_02

Focus-preserving

The control-surface lane is designed to route touch into a virtual workspace without stealing focus or duplicating input — the operator's other work keeps running.

ROLE_03

Bounded, like the rest

Any real routing or synthetic input sits behind explicit approval — the same "no single part acts unchecked" posture that governs the whole AIM operator.

ROLE_04

Cross-machine — research

Extending the lane to route a Windows-owned touchscreen into a Mac workspace is on the roadmap, behind hard safety rails. Not a shipping feature today.

04 / STATUS

A working prototype, on real hardware.

TouchLink builds, signs, launches, and passes its test suite on real hardware. Signing, notarization, and broader device testing come next. Follow the build, or try it on your panel.