Redshift: protect your eyes during long nights in front of your PC

For the night owls amongst us: looking at our screens during long night sessions – thereby at the whole spectrum of visible light from blue to red – means accepting a bunch of unhealthy drawbacks. For example: as the blue part of the spectrum of visible light is usually only visible during daytime our bodies have adapted to using it as a “clock” mechanism: while we see blue light we i.e. release hormones that keep us awake. That can e.g. make falling asleep more difficult/can cause insomnia when we have worked in front of a monitor for a couple of hours until late in the night. Therefore, besides dimming monitors (reduces the contrast to the dark surroundings), reducing the amount of blue light during night sessions and causing a tinge of red on our monitors is a good thing – not only for our eyes, but also for our bodies as a whole.

How to cause a redshift on your screen

Luckily for the night owls amongst us this problem has been recognized and addressed for different platforms already: for example, even many mobile phones provide for the functionality to redshift screen colors nowadays. For Linux, applications that do this job for us include redshift, openlux, and f.lux (the latter seems to be the original thing but is closed source). My current personal recommendation would be to use redshift, as it’s open source, included in the repositories of all major distributions, easy configurable, and does the job with a single command on your terminal. One word for the curious: from the technical perspective redshift relies on an X server extension to function.

Redshift project logo

In terms of features redshift automatically adjusts screen colors to better match what the natural light would be – which would be caused by a sun that has probably already set hours ago, meaning there should be no blue light at all. redshift uses your location and time to adjust the screen colors. It provides for deriving the location automatically, but I personally like providing it by hand (see example below). Next to the location the second important setting is what you want your screen colors to be during daytime and nighttime (the color temperature in K to be exact). Both settings can be provided as parameters when calling redshift from the terminal:

redshift -t DAYTEMPERATURE:NIGHTTEMPERATURE -l LAT:LON

For example, I use those color temperatures and coordinates (for the latter providing exact data is not as important as it might seem):

redshift -t 6500:3200 -l 48:14

One more hint: of course you can autostart redshift with i3 by adding this line to your ~/.i3/config/i3.config:

exec --no-startup-id redshift -t 6500:3200 -l 48:14