one hotkey between your Mac and 1984
Subvenio Screen lives in the menu bar and lays a film-grain, scanline, VHS or sepia look over your whole desktop - every app, the Dock, the menu bar. One hotkey turns it on, the same hotkey turns it off, and the effect is back exactly where you left it after a restart.
The seventeen presets that ship with the app, in the order the menu groups them, each rendered through the same shader the screen gets. The effect itself cannot be screenshotted: the overlay is excluded from screen capture on purpose, so these are offline renders of the picture the settings window previews on.
- Seventeen presets out of the box, grouped in the menu by what they cost: free ones that rewrite the display table, ones that draw a layer over the screen, and ones that read the screen back.
- One global hotkey for the whole screen, recorded in settings. No Accessibility permission needed.
- Live tuning. Every preset has its own sliders - grain strength, vignette, scanline depth - and moving them changes the running effect immediately.
- A preview next to the sliders, so you can see what a preset does before putting it on the whole screen. It runs on a picture that ships with the app, so even the preset that reads the screen previews without asking for anything.
- Window-only mode. Instead of the whole display, the effect can follow a single window as it moves and resizes.
- Pick your display when more than one is connected.
- Light on the machine. Capture size and frame rate caps are yours to set; the effect pauses when the screen sleeps and steps down in Low Power Mode.
- Stays out of the way. No Dock icon, no windows unless you open settings, and problems are reported quietly through the menu bar icon instead of a modal dialog. Animated presets respect the system "Reduce Motion" setting.
- Your own effects. Presets are folders with a Metal shader, not a fixed list. Drop one in and it shows up in the menu without restarting the app, and editing the one that is running changes the screen as you save.
- Update check against the GitHub releases page - weekly by default, or daily, monthly or never, and there is a Check now button. The app never downloads or installs anything by itself; it tells you a version is out and opens the release page.
- English and Russian interface. Launch at login is one checkbox.
- Download the
.dmgfrom the Releases page. - Open it and drag Subvenio Screen into your Applications folder.
- The build carries an ad-hoc signature and is not notarized, so Gatekeeper blocks it on the first launch. Open it once this way: right click (or Control-click) the app in Applications and choose Open, then confirm in the dialog. If macOS still refuses, go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway.
After the first launch macOS remembers the choice and opens the app normally.
If the app is reported as "damaged", the quarantine flag is the cause. Clear it once in Terminal:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Subvenio Screen.app"The app checks the Releases page for a newer version - once a week unless you change it in settings - and tells you in its menu when one is out. Installing is still a manual step: a new version means a new disk image from Releases.
An ad-hoc signature has no lasting identity behind it, and macOS ties the Screen Recording permission to exactly that. An update therefore reads as a different app: the eight presets that read the screen ask for the permission again after one. The nine that need nothing are unaffected.
| Preset | What it does | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Invert | inverts the picture, cursor and menu bar included | free |
| Sepia | warm tint with lifted blacks | free |
| Faded Photo | washed-out warm tint, a photo left in the sun | free |
| Moonlight | blue and dimmed, the day-for-night trick from film | free |
| Scanlines | CRT lines over the screen | one drawn layer |
| Film Grain | flickering grain with a vignette | one drawn layer |
| VHS | purple tint, line noise and a drifting band | one drawn layer |
| Dust & Scratches | film wear: scratches and specks, each one frame long | one drawn layer |
| Projector | even lamp light, the corners in shadow | one drawn layer |
| Black and White | true desaturation, not a tint | reads the screen |
| Phosphor Terminal | luminance poured into one phosphor, amber or green | reads the screen |
| Aperture Grille | every third column to its own phosphor | reads the screen |
| Halation | light spreading past the edge of what emits it | reads the screen |
| Chromatic Aberration | channels diverging towards the edges | reads the screen |
| Halftone | newspaper printing, the grid turned 45 degrees | reads the screen |
| 1-bit Dither | black and white with a Bayer pattern between them | reads the screen |
| Game Boy | the four DMG shades and dithering between them | reads the screen |
The eight presets that read the screen ask for the Screen Recording permission, and only when you turn one on by hand rather than on autostart. The other nine work without any permission at all, and refusing leaves them fully usable.
Swiping between spaces drops every preset except the free four for about a second, until the new space settles. macOS assembles that animation in the compositor and leaves ordinary windows out of it, so a drawn layer cannot be shown during the switch at any window level. The free four are not drawn as a layer at all - they are a table applied to the display itself, after everything else - so they are the ones that stay on through the transition.
The last three are worth a warning: quantising the screen to two shades or four makes small text hard to read. They are effects to look at rather than to work under.
Captured frames live in memory just long enough to be drawn. Nothing is written to disk and nothing leaves the machine.
A preset is a folder with a manifest.json and a Metal fragment function.
New preset from template in settings writes a working one for you and shows
it in Finder; Open shaders folder takes you to the rest. Save a file and the
menu updates itself, no restart - and if you edit the preset that is currently
on screen, the screen follows. A broken preset shows the actual error instead of
quietly disappearing: a manifest that does not parse is named in the menu, and a
shader that does not compile shows the compiler's message under the preview.
A preset can name its own menu bar icon and describe itself in a line that shows up under the preview and as a tooltip in the menu, in English or in Russian.
The bundled presets are yours to edit, and yours to delete. An edited one stays as you left it even when a new version of the app ships a different version of the same preset, a deleted one stays deleted, and Restore bundled presets in settings puts them all back the way they came.
The format is described in DEVELOPMENT.md.
A preset someone hands you is code, not a picture. It is Metal source that this app compiles and runs on your GPU. The app runs inside the App Sandbox, so a preset cannot reach your files or the network, but it can still draw whatever it likes over your whole screen and cost as much GPU time as it wants. Read a shader before you drop it in, the same way you would read a script.
- One effect on one display at a time. You choose which display, but independent presets on several monitors at once are not implemented yet.
- The four free presets share the display's gamma table with Night Shift, f.lux and any custom calibration, and the last one to write it wins. Turning such a preset off restores every display to its ColorSync profile, because the public API to undo a gamma table has no per-display counterpart; whatever else had tinted the screen applies itself again on its own schedule.
- Invert and Sepia cover the whole display by nature and cannot be confined to a single window.
- The overlay is invisible to screenshots and to screen recording, so the effect will not show up in a capture of your own screen.
- Apple Silicon only.
Built from source with make run; the details live in
DEVELOPMENT.md, and the reasoning behind the architecture in
PLAN.md. What changed between versions is in
CHANGELOG.md.
BSD 3-Clause. The two dependencies, KeyboardShortcuts and Pow, are MIT.