Hacking Like Neo

Have you ever wanted to skin your entire computing experience to be completely monochrome green and black like the Matrix? If you are a Mac user, you can.

Honestly though, I do a lot of coding in the dark and use this display a lot. I don't like sitting under bright lights. However, I used to get nasty headaches when looking at a glowing white screen in the dark. To solve this problem, I used to use a shortcut key combination built right into my Mac that would turn "White on Black":

> [CONTROL]+[OPTION]+[COMMAND]+[8] (try it now)

> or navigate through System Preferences -> Universal Access -> Seeing -> Display

Unfortunately, this would just negate all of the colors much like a negative from an old 35 mm roll of film. This wasn't very useful actually. My colors would all be out of whack with some pretty crazy colors (magenta, baby blue, purple, pink, lavender, yellow, etc..) and when I would visit a page that was originally black, then I would get the nasty white glare again.

A few months ago I stumbled upon a cool utility that allows me to do a lot more than just turn "White on Black". The utility is called Nocturne and it has been a dream come true for me. It works by adjusting tints and hues rather than just inverting all of the colors.

Here is a before pic:

Here is an after pic:

Not only does it look bad-ass for anybody looking over my shoulder, but it saves my eye sight when I'm coding in the dark. Best yet, you are not just limited to monochrome green and black. You can configure it to be any color you'd like. I can set my tint to red and it makes my Mac look like a submarine terminal. Check out my iTunes display:

So there it is. If you code in the dark, or want to code like a real hacker (:P), check out Nocturne (it's free)!