presto-reverso-print-o (PRPO)

Run your Epson printer/scanner natively on Apple-silicon macOS — and bin the Intel-era bloatware.

Native ink monitor · menu-bar indicator · driverless scan. No Epson software, no Homebrew, no telemetry.

macOS now warns that bundled vendor apps built for Intel "will not work with a future release of macOS." For Epson all-in-ones, the worst offender is the Epson Low Ink Reminder — a tiny background app that, on inspection, is still x86_64 / i386 / ppc7400 with no arm64 slice at all. It only runs under Rosetta, purely to tell you an ink is low.

But the printer already hands that data out over standard IPP, and modern Epsons scan over Apple's driverless eSCL / AirScan. So you don't need any of it. PRPO replaces the one app worth keeping (the low-ink reminder) with a few kilobytes of native shell + a tiny Swift menu-bar app, and documents how to drop the rest.

Named for pulling the magic back out of the vendor stack: presto-reverso-print-o.

What's in the box

Piece	What it does
epson-ink-check	Reads ink levels over IPP; notifies when any cartridge is low. Pure ipptool + osascript.
PRPO	Small control CLI — status, check, menubar on/off, scan.
PRPO-scan	Driverless flatbed → PDF via eSCL. No Epson software.
PrestoReverso.app	Optional native menu-bar indicator (Swift/Cocoa, LSUIElement). Toggle any time.
scripts/remove-epson-software.sh	Removes the Epson app suite to go fully native (keeps printing + scanning working).

Everything is arm64-native and dependency-free (system ipptool, curl, osascript, swiftc). No Homebrew, no Electron, no telemetry.

Install

git clone https://github.com/HumanjavaEnterprises/PRPO.git
cd PRPO
sh scripts/install.sh

This installs the CLI to ~/.local/bin, builds the menu-bar app into ~/Applications, and enables the low-ink checker (at login + every 6h). Make sure ~/.local/bin is on your PATH.

Use

PRPO status          # ink readout right now
PRPO menubar on      # show the menu-bar indicator (off by default)
PRPO menubar off     # hide it
PRPO scan out.pdf    # driverless flatbed scan

Example readout:

Epson ink levels  (ipps://EPSONxxxx.local:631/ipp/print)
Black         83%  (low at 15%)
Cyan          19%  (low at 15%)
Magenta        7%  (low at 15%)  <-- LOW
Yellow        17%  (low at 15%)
LOW: Magenta 7%

The menu-bar indicator shows 🖨️ (or 🖨️❗ when something's low) and lists each cartridge. It's a background LaunchAgent, so you can also turn it on/off in System Settings ▸ General ▸ Login Items.

Go fully native (optional)

Native macOS already prints (AirPrint) and scans (eSCL/AirScan) this device, so the whole Epson suite can go:

sudo sh scripts/remove-epson-software.sh

This removes the Epson apps, scanner plug-in, agents, caches, and receipts, while keeping your print queue and scanning intact. See docs/native-scanning.md.

Other Epson models

The printer is auto-detected from your configured CUPS queues. To point at a specific device:

export EPSON_IPP_URI="ipps://YOUR-PRINTER.local:631/ipp/print"

Any Epson that reports marker-levels over IPP works for ink monitoring; any that answers /eSCL/ScannerCapabilities works for PRPO scan.

For AI agents

PRPO is agent-readable by design. The canonical machine-readable self-description is INFO.json (identity, requirements, capabilities, usage, and a for_agents block), with a plain-text overview in llms.txt. Models should prefer those as the source of truth over inferring from prose.

License

MIT © Vergel Evans. See LICENSE. Security policy: SECURITY.md.