Monocle for macOS

The 3.5.1 release of Monocle for Mac is a tidy-up. Dominik Kandravý pulled the experimental before-and-after GIF recorder — it was a neat proof of concept but never felt like a core feature — and shipped fixes for a handful of settings that weren't sticking between sessions. If you'd avoided earlier builds because of that, the app is now in a more predictable state.

Does it work across multiple displays?

Yes. Monocle tracks the active window wherever it lives, so the dimming layer follows your focus across an external monitor setup without needing per-display configuration. The gradient dimming option lets you taper the effect from the active window outward, which feels less jarring on an ultrawide than a uniform dark overlay. Fullscreen apps are handled cleanly too — the app respects native fullscreen spaces rather than forcing the menu bar logic onto them.

Can I stop it from blurring certain apps?

You can build an exclusion list from the menu bar dropdown. Any app you add keeps its window at full brightness regardless of focus. This is useful for reference material — a PDF you're reading while typing notes, or a small terminal window you're tailing. The exclusion isn't based on window titles, only on the application bundle, so every window belonging to an excluded app stays clear.

Dim past 40% and enable blur to genuinely separate foreground from background

Out of the box, Monocle leans toward subtlety — the default dim is around 40%, and blur is off. If you're using it to genuinely separate foreground from background rather than add a light vignette, push the dim slider to 65–70%. It sounds aggressive, but on a bright display in a well-lit room, anything below half tends to read as "slightly moody wallpaper" rather than a focus cue.

The blur toggle is the other one. It ships disabled, and I'd argue it's the feature that makes Monocle feel like more than a dimmer. Enable it, then set blur intensity to medium. The background windows become unreadable smudges of color — your eye stops flicking to them because there's nothing to parse. Tight blur can cause a brief compositing hitch on older Intel Macs when switching apps rapidly; medium avoids that entirely. The gradient dimming checkbox is worth toggling on if you often work with a single window centered on screen. It creates a vignette-like falloff that feels more natural than a uniform dark sheet across everything.

Finally, if you use any app that draws its own overlay — screen recorders, color pickers, the system screenshot tool — add it to the exclusion list immediately. Monocle's dimming layer can sit on top of those overlays and make them unusable until you refocus.

Where people hit snags

The most common friction point is window ordering after waking from sleep. macOS sometimes reassigns window levels during a display renegotiation, and Monocle's overlay — drawn at a specific compositing level — can end up covering the active window instead of sitting behind it. The fix is quick: click any other window, then click back. That forces a redraw of the dimming layer in the correct z-order. It's not a Monocle bug so much as a side effect of how CGWindowLevel behaves when the window server restarts after sleep.

Another recurring one: the menu bar icon vanishes when bartender-style utilities are rearranging the menu bar. Monocle registers a single status item; if another utility claims that space during a layout refresh, the icon doesn't reappear until you quit and relaunch. Holding Option and dragging the icon in the menu bar to reorder it yourself usually prevents the conflict.

People also occasionally report that blur stops working on a specific display after unplugging and replugging an external monitor. The compositor sometimes caches a stale blur radius for the old display configuration. Toggling blur off and back on from the menu bar dropdown resets the filter pipeline for all active displays.

Per-app exclusion list and blur intensity now persist across logouts

The 3.5.1 update is modest but real. The settings that weren't persisting — mostly the per-app exclusion list and the blur intensity value — now survive a logout. Before the fix, you'd rebuild your exclusion list after every restart, which made the feature feel like an afterthought. Now it sticks, and the mental model matches the actual behavior: set it once, forget it.

The removal of the before-and-after GIF recorder cleans up the menu bar dropdown. That feature had its own capture button and a small preview panel that added clutter. With it gone, the menu is just the dimming controls and the exclusion list — nothing you have to read twice. The minor improvements Dominik mentions are under the compositing hood: the blur shader now respects the system reduce-transparency accessibility setting. If you have that enabled, Monocle falls back to a flat dim without attempting the Gaussian pass, which keeps the UI consistent with the rest of the system.

Writers and long-form readers get a tunnel effect that reduces distraction

Monocle isn't for everyone, and that's by design. It's a focused utility, not a general-audience tool.

Writers and long-form readers. If you spend hours in a single text editor or PDF viewer, the dimming creates a tunnel that genuinely reduces the impulse to check Slack or bounce to a browser. The gradient option works especially well here — the edges of the screen fade out, and your peripheral vision stops pinging you with motion from background windows.

Multi-display users. Having a reference display and a work display is common, but the inactive display still pulls attention with bright UI elements. Monocle dims everything on the display that doesn't hold the active window, so your secondary monitor becomes a muted information board rather than a competing light source.

Night workers and dark-room users. The dimming layer reduces total light output from the display, which matters when you're the only one awake and every nit of brightness feels like a flashlight. Combine it with macOS Night Shift for a setup that's genuinely comfortable at 2 a.m. — the blur effect softens harsh window borders that Night Shift doesn't touch.

Anyone with attention fragmentation. If you find yourself context-switching because a notification badge lit up in a background window, Monocle hides that visual cue until you tab over. It's not a blocker — it's a dimmer — but the psychological effect is real: out of sight edges closer to out of mind. The exclusion list means you can keep one monitoring window (email, server status, a chat list) visible while everything else fades back.

It's less suited to people who live in many small floating windows — a palettes-and-panels workflow, or someone who keeps five Finder windows tiled. In that setup, the "active window" concept Monocle relies on gets fuzzy, and you'll spend more time fighting the dimming than benefiting from it. The exclusion list can paper over some of that, but the app's design assumes you work primarily in one focused window at a time.

• Fixes a few settings issues where preferences wouldn't persist across relaunches.
• Removes the experimental before-and-after GIF feature.
• Includes minor under-the-hood improvements.

• macOS 14.6 or later
• Apple Silicon or Intel processor
• Interface language: English