How to disable Night Shift in apps on macOS
Night Shift on macOS isn’t too ambitious. It was a clone of the popular Flux app and it has not tried to be better than the original idea. In fact, many would say Flux is still better. Night Shift, when enabled, applies to your entire screen, irrespective of the app that you’re using but you can selectively disable Night Shift in apps on macOS with a free app called Shifty.
Disable Night Shift in apps
Download and install Shifty. It will run from the Menu Bar. Turn on Night Shift and then open the app that you want to disable Night Shift for. Once the app is active, click Shifty’s button in the menu bar and select the option to disable it for the current app. In the screenshot below, you can see there’s an option to disable Night Shift for Safari since it’s the active app at the moment.
How it works
Whenever you bring an app that you’ve disabled Night Shift for into focus, Night Shift will turn off for your entire screen. The tint that it adds will not be removed for just the screen area where the app is. As such, when you switch between apps that have Night Shift enabled, and those that have it disabled, you will see the feature turn on over the course of a second or two.
Other features
Shiftly’s core, stand-out feature is its ability to disable Night Shift in apps of your choosing but in addition to that, it can also act as a quick toggle to enable or disable the feature, change the tint level, and schedule when the app itself runs.
It’s also big on keyboard shortcuts. If you go to Shifty’s preferences, you will find a tab dedicated to shortcuts where you can record custom shortcuts for controlling just about every feature of the app. If nothing else, you can use the app to change the tint of Night Shift with your keyboard from anywhere. This is something you can’t do on a Mac out of the box.
To be clear, Shifty is not adding its own tint to your screen. It is still using the Night Shift feature in macOS. What the app does is, it asks how you want Night Shift to work and then acts as a go-between you and the system to enable and disable the feature so that you don’t have to do it manually.
Well, the thing is, if you disable night shift only for a short period of time in the evening, that will make it useless, as the brain reacts to the blue light almost immediately.