facecam

tiny macOS app for floating your webcam feed on your desktop to capture in screen recordings. small, minimal, fast, and written in rust.

why

you want to record a demo or walkthrough with macOS' native screen recorder (cmd+shift+5) and skip the bloat of products like Loom. open facecam, start your screen recording, done.

features

• displays your webcam feed on desktop in a bubble
• is a 360kb binary
• pure rust via objc2 bindings to appkit/avfoundation. no webview, no electron
• resizable

install

install the latest release straight from your terminal (apple silicon + intel):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/trouze/facecam/main/install.sh | sh

that downloads the latest facecam.app from gitHub releases and puts it in /Applications. to install elsewhere:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/trouze/facecam/main/install.sh | INSTALL_DIR="$HOME/Applications" sh

prefer doing it by hand?

curl -fsSL -o /tmp/facecam.app.zip https://github.com/trouze/facecam/releases/latest/download/FaceCam.app.zip
unzip -q -o /tmp/facecam.app.zip -d /tmp && cp -R /tmp/facecam.app /Applications/

there is no auto-updating functionality, to update just re-run the install command — it replaces the old version:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/trouze/facecam/main/install.sh | sh

or if facecam is running, quit it first (right-click the bubble → quit facecam, or pkill -x facecam).

build

requires macOS 13+, a camera, and rust (rustup).

./build.sh --release
cp -r target/release/facecam.app /Applications/

build.sh compiles the binary, assembles facecam.app (with the camera usage description required by TCC), and ad-hoc signs it.

run

open target/release/facecam.app

grant camera access when prompted, then drag the bubble wherever you want. start your screen recording (cmd + shift + 5) and your face gets captured along with everything else.

license

MIT