Grayscale on your Mac,
done properly

The built-in way first

You do not need an app to try grayscale. Open System Settings → Accessibility → Display → Color Filters, pick Grayscale, and switch it on. If you just want to see whether a colorless screen calms your eyes or your feed-scrolling, start there. It is free and it works.

Its limits show up with daily use. The toggle lives four levels deep in Settings. It applies to every connected display at once. It cannot be mixed with dimming, warmth, or contrast changes. And there is no way to keep two or three variations you actually like.

What E-Paper mode adds

Nox ships grayscale as a preset called E-Paper, one of 12 built-in filters, and treats it like every other filter: fully adjustable and instantly reachable.

• One click in the menu bar, or a global keyboard shortcut, to enter and leave grayscale.
• Per-display control: gray on the writing monitor, full color where color matters.
• Combine it with dimming below minimum brightness, black point lift, contrast, and color temperature for a true e-ink feel at night.
• Save your own variants: a soft warm gray for reading, a dimmer gray for late work, whatever your eyes prefer.

People reach for grayscale for different reasons: fewer color pings from icons and badges, a calmer reading surface, or plain visual fatigue. Nox comes at it from the light-sensitivity side; the same app carries research-based spectral presets for people whose eyes need more than less color. If your screen is a comfort problem and not just a distraction problem, that page is the deeper story.

What Nox changes on your Mac

Nox is a menu bar app for macOS 14 and later, downloaded as a signed DMG from this site. While running, it writes to the display's gamma tables through the standard macOS display APIs. It installs no kernel or system extensions and requires no account. Toggling the filter off or quitting Nox restores full color immediately. To uninstall, quit Nox and move it from Applications to the Trash. Details on data handling are in the privacy policy; support is support@getnoxapp.com.