Redshift Tray

Many of you are likely familiar with Redshift, a command-line screen color temperature adjuster that has been around for quite a while. It is lightweight and versatile, but not exactly suitable for novices.

Thankfully, those who are not fans of the command console can now use Redshift Tray, an intuitive app that provides you with a GUI for the widely-used command-line tool. It is very easy to control, and relatively simple to configure.

When working late at night, the contrast between the bright computer monitor and the darkness of your room can cause eye strain, not to mention mess up your sleep pattern.

Applications like Redshift try to deal with this by adjusting the temperature, not brightness, of the light being emitted by your screen. By shifting it toward the red side of the spectrum, it becomes warmer, similar to the ambient light at sunrise or sunset.

Once you have launched the app, you can enable or disable the screen color adjustment by just double-clicking the system tray icon. You can also pause the service for a certain number of minutes or force the full nighttime adjustment regardless of the current time of day.

A few handy keyboard shortcuts are also available for controlling some of the app’s functions, such as pausing the service or fine-tuning the color temperature.

While the main program functions are easily accessible, you will need to open the INI configuration file to change a few advanced settings. These include setting your location manually, customizing the color temperature, enabling traveling mode and setting the pause timer.

Granted, replacing a few values in the INI file is not too difficult, and the documentation is very helpful in this regard. Nevertheless, we would have preferred to see a complete GUI that even complete novices can use effortlessly.

In short, Redshift Tray is a great system tray app for users who need a more intuitive alternative to the console-based Redshift. It is lightweight, portable and very easy to use, although altering the advanced settings is a bit trickier.