graytoggle

Instant grayscale mode for Linux, built for the XFCE4 desktop.

One command turns your entire screen black-and-white — and one command turns it back. No hardware, no monitor color settings, no "night light" gimmicks. It's 100% software: a real-time GLSL shader running through your compositor.

Grayscale mode is one of the best-known tricks for cutting phone/screen addiction and doomscrolling — iOS and Android have shipped it for years. Linux desktops, and XFCE4 in particular, never got one. graytoggle is that missing feature.

Why this exists

XFCE4 has no built-in grayscale mode — unlike GNOME or KDE, there's no setting to flip. Building one meant taking over xfwm4's compositor, swapping in picom on the fly without breaking shadows/transparency, running a per-window fragment shader, and handing compositing cleanly back to xfwm4 the moment you're done — all without leaving orphan processes or a broken desktop if any step fails. graytoggle is the result of solving that, wrapped in a single command.

What it does

Running graytoggle will:

1. Turn off xfwm4's built-in compositor.
2. Start picom with a grayscale window shader.
3. On the next run, stop picom and hand compositing back to xfwm4.

The shader computes real luminance (0.2126R + 0.7152G + 0.0722B) per pixel, per window, live. Nothing about your display, monitor, or graphics driver is touched — it's a pure compositing-layer effect that turns off as cleanly as it turns on.

Requirements

Linux with an X11 session running XFCE4:

• XFCE4 (xfwm4)
• picom
• xfconf-query (ships with xfce4)
• xprop (ships with x11-utils / x11-xserver-utils)

Missing something? Just run graytoggle — it detects exactly what's missing and prints the install command for your package manager (apt, dnf, pacman, zypper).

Install

One-liner (clones the repo and runs make install):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mkalmousli/graytoggle/master/install.sh | sh

Or manually:

git clone https://github.com/mkalmousli/graytoggle
cd graytoggle
make install

Installs to ~/.local/bin/graytoggle by default. Make sure ~/.local/bin is on your PATH.

Install elsewhere with:

make install PREFIX=/usr/local

Uninstall

make uninstall

Usage

graytoggle          # toggle grayscale on/off
graytoggle --force  # take over from another running compositor if needed

Bind it to a keyboard shortcut in XFCE's Keyboard settings for a one-key grayscale toggle — the fastest way to make your desktop as boring (and as easy to put down) as a black-and-white phone.

License

GPL-3.0