Pearipherals

Apple's peripherals, minus the Apple computer. Make a Magic Keyboard + Magic Trackpad 2 feel at home on Windows — one portable exe, no install, free.

Windows pairs Apple's Bluetooth peripherals fine, but leaves them half-broken: the trackpad acts as a dumb 2-button mouse and the keyboard's F-row does nothing Mac-like. Magic in, tragic out. The paid tools fix this behind a license — Pearipherals is the free, open-source alternative.

Three parts, one tray app:

Tragic Keyboard	Mac-style function row for the Magic Keyboard
Tragic Trackpad	three-finger gestures the Bluetooth driver won't do
Moodio Display	brightness for the Studio Display (and any other monitor)

Tragic Keyboard — Mac-style function row

Key	Action
F1 / F2	Display brightness down / up (via Moodio)
F3	Task View (Mission Control)
F4	Search (Spotlight)
F5 / F6	Passthrough
F7 / F8 / F9	Previous / Play-Pause / Next
F10 / F11 / F12	Mute / Volume down / Volume up

Hold any modifier (Ctrl/Alt/Shift/Win) to get the raw F-key — Alt+F4, Ctrl+F5 etc. all work unchanged. Toggle the whole layer from the tray icon.

Tragic Trackpad — three-finger gestures that actually work

The Magic Trackpad 2's Bluetooth driver reports contacts one at a time, which breaks Windows' native 3-finger gesture detection entirely. Tragic Trackpad reassembles the touch data itself (Raw Input + per-contact tracking) and gives you a choice of 3-finger behavior from the tray:

• Swipes (default, mac-like navigation):
  • swipe down → minimize all windows
  • swipe up → restore them back
  • swipe left/right → app switcher (Task View)
• Drag — macOS-style three-finger drag: move windows, select text, with a grace period so you can lift and reposition mid-drag
• Off — hand the gesture back to Windows

Plus a natural scrolling toggle (note: Windows applies scroll direction when the trackpad connects — flip the trackpad's power switch off/on after toggling, or reboot).

Moodio Display — brightness that finds a way

F1/F2 try, in order: Apple Studio Display over USB HID, then DDC/CI for any normal external monitor, then GPU gamma-ramp dimming as a last resort. So the brightness keys do something sensible on basically any display, including laptop panels and monitors with no DDC support.

App behavior

• Single portable exe, config sits next to it (pearipherals.json)
• First run: enables autostart + applies the touchpad settings the gestures need (originals backed up, restorable from the tray), then says so in a notification so you know what changed and where to undo it
• Tray icon: every feature can be toggled or reverted; Quit stops everything
• Crash-resilient: auto-retries at logon, errors logged to pearipherals.err.log
• Single-instance guard — safe to double-launch
• Moving the exe? Run it once from the new location — autostart re-points itself

Requirements

1. Windows 10/11, Magic Keyboard / Magic Trackpad 2 paired over Bluetooth
2. For the trackpad: the open-source mac-precision-touchpad driver (signed, free) — this is what turns the trackpad into a real Windows Precision Touchpad with pointer + 2-finger scrolling. Tragic Trackpad builds on top of it for everything the driver can't deliver. The keyboard features work without any driver.

Quick start

1. Install the mac-precision-touchpad driver (trackpad only, once)
2. Download Pearipherals.exe from Releases and put it anywhere (USB stick, Dropbox, C:\Tools, …)
3. Run it — done. It sets up autostart and the right touchpad settings on first launch, and lives in your tray.

Windows SmartScreen may warn on first run (unsigned exe) — click "More info" → "Run anyway". You can always build it from source instead.

Upgrading from MagicSuite? Just run the new exe — it picks up your old magicsuite.json settings and cleans up the old autostart entry. Delete the old exe afterwards.

Uninstall

Tray → untick Start with Windows → Touchpad settings → Restore Windows defaults → Quit → delete the exe. Nothing else is left behind.

Building from source

python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\pip install -r requirements.txt
.venv\Scripts\pyinstaller --onefile --windowed --name Pearipherals --icon pearipherals.ico --hidden-import pystray._win32 pearipherals.py

The exe lands in dist\Pearipherals.exe. Or just run build.bat.

How it works (for the curious)

• F-row: a low-level keyboard hook (WH_KEYBOARD_LL) intercepts F1–F12, swallows them, and injects media/brightness actions. Modifier-held presses pass through untouched. Injected events are tagged so the hook never loops.
• Brightness: tries Apple Studio Display USB HID (protocol from asdbctl), then DDC/CI via dxva2.dll, then falls back to GPU gamma-ramp dimming — so it works on basically any monitor.
• Gestures: registers Raw Input for the Precision Touchpad usage (0x0D/0x05) with RIDEV_INPUTSINK and parses per-contact X/Y/tip through HidP_*. Because the Bluetooth driver reports one contact per HID report (which is why native Windows 3-finger gestures never fire), contacts are reassembled in a rolling table keyed by contact ID with freshness/age gates against ghost contacts. A state machine (idle → armed → fired / dragging → grace) turns that into swipes or drag, and a low-level mouse hook freezes the leaked pointer motion while 3 fingers are down. Actions go out via SendInput. No kernel code, no admin rights.

Known limitations

• Scroll direction changes need a trackpad reconnect (Windows caches the setting at device init — nothing an app can do about it)
• 4-finger gestures aren't handled (yet)
• The Fn key itself is invisible to Windows (Apple vendor-page only over Bluetooth) — that's why the F-row layer exists

License

MIT

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Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Apple Inc. Apple, Magic Keyboard, Magic Trackpad and Studio Display are trademarks of Apple Inc., used here only to describe the hardware this software supports.