Redshift

Adjusts the colour temperature of your screen by time of day.

Redshift gradually shifts your display from cool daylight hues to warmer evening tones based on local sunrise and sunset, on the theory that less blue-spectrum light helps with sleep. The transition over evening hours is smooth, and a manual override lets you keep the daylight colour temperature for tasks where colour fidelity matters.

Jon Lund Steffensen released Redshift in 2010, inspired by the proprietary f.lux. The project is GPL-3.0 and packaged in every major Linux distribution, but is X11-only — its method of adjusting the display gamma ramp does not work on Wayland.

For Wayland sessions, gammastep is the canonical drop-in replacement; it shares Redshift's configuration file format and behaviour. Many users have a small wrapper script in their session config that detects X11 vs Wayland and starts the right one. The basic idea has spread well beyond Linux — macOS Night Shift and Windows Night Light implement the same concept natively.

License: GPL-3.0-or-later

Category: Desktop

Website: https://github.com/jonls/redshift

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install redshift
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install redshift
Arch:          sudo pacman -S redshift

Authors

Jon Lund Steffensen (creator)

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