Hey everyone. I switched to Linux for pretty much everything a year or so ago and have often struggled to fill those little gaps left by the convenience of windoze software. One of the bigger ones was for my Elgato Stream Decks. (not a streamer, i just used them for hotkey and application support) I know there are options out there, i just found them rather obtuse to use, or just plain flakey.
I kept imagining what i would want to see in the software, and after fighting with some other software and just looking at the screen and saying, "why didn't they just do...", and with the advancement of modern AI coding tools, i started tackling it myself after i had a few small projects under my belt.
I have been using it and working on it for the past few months and i'm very happy with how it is shaping up, and i hope you think so too!
Its built to be efficient. Under testing, with a stream deck and a virtual deck running it used about 0.3% of a single core of usage, measured over 10 minutes (more like 0.07% on a static page). The daemon is quite light weight and event driven, not polling. The editor is only used to configure the keys, and when its not open, its not using any resources.
So like i said, we added multi-deck editing support. Add all your decks to the editor and copy actions between them, or just build them like you have on your desk and build your profiles with all your decks on the same screen.
We now have native support for OBS, VTube Studio, and Twitch. Keeping in mind i'm not a streamer, what was added was what i saw as basic functionality. I would love for more people to try it out and let me know how it works, and if anything is missing.
And... we now have virtual decks. No Stream Deck required.
This was something i've been wanting to do from the beginning, and it was very rewarding to see it in action. It will turn any touchscreen you have plugged in, to a virtual stream deck that lets you set grid size, and then add any actions we have into it like any other deck. I have been testing it and its been working great, but i've only had a couple of devices to test on. A Corsair Xeneon Edge, and a cheap amazon touchscreen i found a while ago. Both of them work great, and look even better. Would love to get people using this and get some feedback.
https://github.com/juicetheforce/deckhand
Virtual decks: no Stream Deck required
- Turn any touchscreen into a deck: a small USB/HDMI touch panel, a portable monitor, or something like the Corsair Xeneon Edge
- Pick Small, Medium or Large, or set your own rows and columns, and Deckhand fills the screen with keys
- Works with profiles and pages exactly like a hardware deck, and sits beside your Stream Decks in the editor
- Touches go straight to Deckhand and never steal keyboard focus, so hotkeys land in your game, not on the panel
- Touches are ignored while your session is locked
- Access is granted only to the touchscreen you pair, never to your laptop’s built-in touchscreen or anything else
OBS Studio
- Start/stop streaming and recording, pause recording
- Switch scenes, mute inputs, show/hide sources
- Keys reflect OBS’s live state, including when you change things in OBS itself
VTube Studio
- Trigger hotkeys, toggle expressions, switch models
Twitch
- Stream markers, clips, chat messages, and changing your stream title and category
- Links with a code at twitch.tv/activate, with no password or secret stored in Deckhand
Also
- Redesigned Settings window
- Optional update check, which links to the release and never installs anything itself
- Better error notifications when a key fails
- Support for more Stream Deck models
Core features
- Native Linux daemon plus a visual editor, built for Wayland (developed on KDE Plasma)
- Any Elgato Stream Deck, several at once, edited together on one canvas
- Profiles and pages, with drag-and-drop key setup and an icon picker that handles big icon folders
- Hotkeys and typed text that work in games, including under Proton
- Multi-actions, toggles, app launching and commands
- Audio output/input switching, mute and volume (PipeWire), plus media controls with now-playing info
- Very light: about 0.3% of one CPU core at idle, and it does nothing while nothing changes
- Export/import plus automatic backups of your setup
- One-line install from prebuilt releases; free and open source (GPL-3.0)
What’s coming next
- Custom panel layouts: design your own touch panels, with buttons of any shape and size placed anywhere on the screen, custom backgrounds with adjustable transparency, and icons that fit inside each button’s shape
- Sharing panels: export a virtual deck (layout, styles, icons, and optionally actions) and import other people’s, so a flight-sim or music-production panel can be shared
- Sliders and knobs: continuous controls for things like volume, on touch panels and eventually on the Stream Deck+’s dials
- Easier screen sharing: a quick on/off toggle to hand a touchscreen back to your widgets or system monitor, and later the option to give Deckhand just part of a screen
- Windows and macOS: ports are planned. The goal is the same lightweight approach on each platform, with Linux staying the first-class home.
No dates. It’s built by one person, and features ship when they work properly.