Paper Overlay
A native macOS menu-bar utility that overlays a subtle, GPU-rendered paper-grain texture across your whole screen to reduce digital eye strain.
Features
- Menu-bar only — no Dock icon, no windows; everything lives in a dropdown from the status bar icon.
- Procedural Metal shader — grain generated on the GPU, tunable grain size, tile size, per-channel intensity, gamma, and opacity. Idle GPU usage is ~zero.
- 100% click-through — never intercepts clicks, drags, or games, and follows you across Spaces and fullscreen apps.
- Multi-monitor with hot-plug — one overlay per display, added and removed live, mixed Retina scales handled.
- Presets — Neutral, Warm, Sepia, Night, Reading, plus unlimited named custom presets.
- Private by design — no network access and no Accessibility, Screen Recording, camera, microphone, or file permissions.
Install
Requires macOS 13 Ventura or newer. Paper Overlay is unsigned, so Gatekeeper blocks it once — the .pkg installer is the recommended route: after the first block, go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway, and the installed app never prompts again. Full instructions and a .dmg alternative are in the README.