Greyout

Greyout

Grey out your screen. Kill the distraction.

Your screen keeps stealing your focus. Greyout drains the colour from your display so bright apps and notifications stop pulling at you. It's a tiny, native macOS menu-bar app that switches to greyscale automatically per app, on a schedule, or with one keypress.

Download for macOS · v0.17.1 · 1.5 MB

macOS may warn on first open

Requires macOS 14+ · Apple silicon · free · self-updating

Free forever. Optional Premium to support development.

How it works

See what it does in two seconds.

▶ Demo coming soon: one keypress toggles greyscale

Per-app rules

Auto-grey distracting apps; keep colour where you need it.

On a schedule

Wind down into greyscale toward the evening, automatically.

One keypress

Toggle from the menu bar, or from any tool via the greyout:// scheme.

Raycast

In testing

Toggle, activate, or deactivate Greyout without leaving Raycast.

Command line

In testing

Script it from the terminal: open greyout://toggle.

Shortcuts

Soon

Drive Greyout from your macOS Shortcuts automations.

Alfred

Soon

Fire Greyout from an Alfred workflow.

Questions

Changelog

Greyout updates itself automatically. Here's what's changed.

  1. v0.17.1

    "Check for Updates" now works on the first click. Greyout is a menu-bar (agent) app, so it wasn't frontmost when Sparkle tried to show the update window — the first check appeared to do nothing and only a second click surfaced the dialog. Greyout now brings itself to the front before checking, so the update prompt shows on the first try.

  2. v0.17.0

    Removed "Deactivate Greyscale" from the menu. Left-clicking the menu-bar icon already toggles greyscale on/off, so the separate menu item was redundant. Right-click still opens the menu; the "Activate for Duration" submenu is unchanged.

  3. v0.16.0

    Restore last state on launch (General settings). When enabled, Greyout comes back the way you left it after a quit/restart — greyscale if you had it on, colour if off — restoring your manual activation (timed activations resume with their remaining time and expire if the deadline has passed). Distinct from "Activate on launch", which always turns greyscale on.

Show 13 earlier releases

  1. v0.15.0

    Reopen opens Preferences. Launching Greyout while it's already running (Spotlight, double-clicking Greyout.app, or the Dock) now opens the Preferences window instead of doing nothing. First launch is unchanged — the app still starts quietly in the menu bar.

  2. v0.14.0

    Activate verb (URL + CLI): greyout://activate?duration=30m / greyout activate 30 start a *timed* greyscale session; omit the duration to use the app's default activation duration. Bare numbers are minutes; m/h suffixes work; range 1 min–8 h (clamps). greyout://on / greyout on stay indefinite.

  3. v0.13.0

    Quick Peek is now bidirectional. Holding the peek hotkey flashes the *opposite* of the current screen state — on greyscale it momentarily shows colour, on colour it momentarily shows greyscale — and restores on release. (Was colour-only; the Settings row is now labelled "Quick peek (hold)".) Note: macOS animates the Color-Filters transition, so hold the combo briefly to see the change; peek is smoothest (no overlay, faster) with "Suppress the Color Filters overlay" enabled in Settings → General.

  4. v0.10.0

    Greyout command-line client. Control Greyout from the terminal, shell aliases, git hooks, tmux, and cron. Free verbs: on / off / toggle / snooze <15m|1h> / prefs / status [--json] / install. Premium verbs (export / backup / import [--merge]) reuse SettingsPortability and gate on the cached licence. The CLI is a thin client on the existing brain — it links GreyoutCore, fires greyout:// URLs for live actions, reads a published runtime.json for status, and never re-implements policy. The running app stays the sole writer of settings.json (import routes through the app when it's running, writes directly when it isn't).

  5. v0.9.1

    Premium polish: Activate disables while a request is in-flight (protects your key's 3 device slots), status messages word-wrap.

  6. v0.9.0

    Premium now uses Polar.sh license keys: paste your GREYOUT-… key in Preferences → Premium (validated online once, then offline). The email field is gone (keys are key-only).

  7. v0.8.0

    HUD-free greyscale toggling (no more Color-Filters HUD on every switch) + schedule windows start disabled until you enable them.

  8. v0.7.1

    Copy/paste now works in text fields (e.g. the licence key).

  9. v0.7.0

    Greyscale now applies to ALL displays (external monitors fixed) via the MediaAccessibility effector; saves/restores your Color-Filters state; reverts on quit.

  10. v0.6.0

    Premium tier (offline licensing) + export/import/backup, snooze, schedule tab, global hotkeys, launch-at-login, media exclusions, and degraded/limited menu states.

  11. v0.3.0

    Activate for Duration (timed greyscale).

  12. v0.2.3

    Self-update enabled.

  13. v0.2.2

    Menu-bar grayscale app. Self-update enabled (Sparkle).