Circle Lens
Circle twice for a lens. Twice more and it's gone.
Get picks like this daily. The day's top launches, AI/tech news, and a weekly opportunity spotlight — straight to your inbox.
This is 1 of 95 launches in desktop and display utilities — see how it stacks up on momentum and crowding →
82 other launches read as similar to this one →
Details
- External ID
- 1277356
- Source
- PH
- Company
- —
- Product
- Circle Lens
- Website domain
- producthunt.com
- Launched
- Oct. 12, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 1
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.33
- Tags
- Windows, Productivity, Open Source, GitHub
Description
Circle Lens is a free magnifier that opens where you look. Circle your mouse twice, or tap Shift twice, and a lens follows your pointer at up to 4×. Circle twice again to close it. It zooms only what you're reading, so your layout stays intact, and it eases back when you move fast. A 4.5 MB Windows app that installs without admin rights, plus a browser extension and a 7 KB script for your own site. Open source (MIT), no account, no tracking.
Enrichment
- Niche
- desktop and display utilities
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Workflow automation
- Audience
- Prosumer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- gesture-based screen magnifier for desktop
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Implementing a smooth, low-latency screen magnifier with custom gesture detection (mouse circling or double-taps) on Windows requires native low-level Windows APIs and hook programming.
What it would actually take: Needs a native desktop binary (written in C++, C#, or Rust) utilizing low-level Windows hooks (`SetWindowsHookEx`) to intercept global mouse and keyboard events. The real-time magnification lens must use the Desktop Duplication API (DXGI) or Windows Magnification API to capture and render arbitrary desktop areas at 60+ FPS with minimal CPU/GPU overhead.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 82 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #47 of 83 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 336 days after the earliest competitor.
- circle-lens · github · 2026-10-11 · 23 upvotes · similarity 0.81
- Lenses Magnifier · ph · 2026-10-03 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.62
- Cursor Glass · ph · 2026-09-27 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- iPhone app takes simultaneous images from 2 lenses, fuses into 1 photo · hn · 2026-08-08 · 329 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- MagnifySlider · ph · 2026-10-06 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Lens · ph · 2026-09-18 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- MouseKit · ph · 2026-09-10 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Tap2Click · ph · 2026-10-12 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.38
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.