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d o t c o m j a c k

Nocturne

Your Focus already silences your phone. Now it silences the clock.

You flip Do Not Disturb before a deep block, the way you have a thousand times. The phone goes quiet. Notifications stop. Every device you own agrees that you are working, and the one thing still talking to you is the clock in the corner of your own Mac, which is the interruption nobody ever gave you a switch for.

Nocturne is that switch, and as of 1.3.0 you do not have to touch it. Turn on a Focus anywhere in your ecosystem, from your iPhone, from the Watch, from Control Center, and your Mac's menu bar goes with it. Turn the Focus off and it comes back exactly as it was.

macOS 14 or later. No permissions. No private APIs. No account. Around 3,200 lines of Swift, of which roughly a third is the comments explaining what was measured and why.

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The part worth stealing even if you never install this

You cannot hide the macOS menu bar clock. Not with a checkbox, and not with any of the defaults incantations that turn up when you search for it.

The clock is the one menu bar item Apple gives no visibility toggle. In System Settings under Menu Bar, Siri, Spotlight, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Battery and AirDrop all have a checkbox. Clock has a Clock Options button and nothing else.

Three widely repeated tricks are dead. Measured on macOS 26.3.1 by reading the on-screen width of Control Center's Clock window before and after each write:

_HIHideMenuBar and AutoHideMenuBarOption do not work either. Both store fine, and System Settings reads the value back correctly, but neither applies without a logout, which makes them useless for a toggle.

So the trick is not to hide the clock. It is to make it unreadable. An analog dial at 44pt still tells the time, in the sense that a sundial in another room tells the time. Your eye stops catching it, and nothing is hidden, moved, or drawn over.

Measure, do not screenshot. Every number above came from CGWindowListCopyWindowInfo, reading the clock window's width directly. Sleep-and-screenshot lied twice during development: Control Center takes a few seconds to repopulate after a restart, and a screenshot taken during that gap shows an empty menu bar that looks exactly like a successful hide.

And the window list has a trap in it. kCGWindowBounds is free to read, but kCGWindowName is gated behind Screen Recording. An early version of the locator filtered on name == "Clock" and appeared to work perfectly, because it was being launched from a terminal and inheriting that terminal's permission. Launched normally as an app it returned nothing, silently:

So Nocturne identifies the clock by where it sits, never by what it is called. If you test anything against the window list, test it as a real app bundle, not from your shell.

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Install

Download Nocturne 1.3.0, open the disk image, drag it to Applications.

Or with Homebrew:

brew install --cask dotcomjack/tap/nocturne

Signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it opens on a double click with no right-click-to-open dance and no Gatekeeper warning. The disk image is notarized and stapled too, not just the app inside it. Universal, Apple silicon and Intel.

Or build it yourself, which is the point of it being MIT:

git clone https://github.com/dotcomjack/nocturne.git
cd nocturne
./build.sh

Requires xcodegen (brew install xcodegen) and Xcode.

Use

The menu bar icon is the whole interface. Click it for modes, settings and quit, the same as every other menu bar app.

Four modes:

Those are real captures of one menu bar on macOS 26.3.1, not mockups. The faint band at the right of the Gone row is the seam described below, left in rather than retouched out.

Hover to show hands the bar back on demand. Turn it on and the cover drops away while the pointer is on the menu bar, then comes back when the pointer leaves, so you can read the time by going to look for it rather than by changing a setting. Off by default, and offered only in Gone and Hide everything: Blind hides the time by writing Control Center's own preference, and undoing that costs a Control Center restart, which is far too slow to spend on a hover. It costs no permission either, because macOS gates key events behind accessibility and leaves mouse events alone. On more than one display only the bar you are actually pointing at uncovers.

Follow Focus

Turn on Do Not Disturb on your phone. Your Mac's menu bar goes dark too.

Focus is already the thing you flip when you want the world to leave you alone, and it already syncs across everything signed into your iCloud account. Nocturne hooks into it, so the switch you were already pressing now does one more useful thing.

It is a Focus filter, which means it lives where macOS puts these, not in a settings pane of mine. Set it up once:

System Settings > Focus > pick a Focus > Add Filter > Nocturne > choose a mode.

That is the whole setup. Start that Focus and the menu bar goes. End it and the mode you were on comes back. Set it on Do Not Disturb only, or on Work and Sleep too, whichever ones you actually want it for. It is per Focus, so there is no "any Focus / this Focus" switch to get wrong.

It costs no permission at all. Not Full Disk Access, not Accessibility, not Screen Recording, not a Focus prompt. macOS tells Nocturne when the Focus starts and ends, the same way it tells Mail and Safari. Measured, the whole round trip from the system recording the Focus to Nocturne's code running is 18ms.

It gives the mode back, and it knows when not to. Nocturne remembers what you were on before the Focus started and returns you to it, including across a quit or a crash, because the app can be killed while a Focus is running and you should still get your own mode back. But if you pick a different mode by hand while the Focus is on, it leaves your choice alone. An automation that yanks the wheel back the second your Focus ends is worse than no automation.

The two obvious ways to build this are both wrong

This is the part worth reading even if you never install anything.

Reading ~/Library/DoNotDisturb/DB/Assertions.json is a trap. It is the answer every search result gives. It is plain JSON, it names the exact Focus, and it works perfectly right up until you ship, because that directory is TCC protected and reading it needs Full Disk Access. The identical binary, in two launch contexts on macOS 26.4:

and the kernel says so out loud:

System Policy: Nocturne(99186) deny(1) file-read-data
  /Users/…/Library/DoNotDisturb/DB/Assertions.json

It reads fine from a shell only because Terminal already holds Full Disk Access. That is the same trap this project already documents for kCGWindowName, one section up, and I walked straight into it a second time in the same codebase. Test it as a real app bundle, not from your shell. A clock utility asking for Full Disk Access is absurd, so that route is closed rather than inconvenient.

INFocusStatusCenter costs a permission and then answers too little. It is Apple's public Focus API and it prompts the user. It reports a single optional boolean, so it can never tell you which Focus is on. And unauthorised it does not fail, it lies: measured on 26.4, polling every two seconds while Do Not Disturb was genuinely on, it returned Optional(false) every single time. A silent wrong answer is worse than an error.

The undocumented part: telling "Focus started" from "Focus ended"

Apple's own dialog promises that "selected apps will be notified when this Focus turns on or off", and nothing anywhere says how to tell the two apart. Both calls arrive as the same perform() with the same parameters. With a non-optional parameter they are genuinely indistinguishable:

@Parameter(title: "Mode", default: .hideEverything) var mode: FocusFilterMode

Focus ON    perform() mode=hideEverything
Focus OFF   perform() mode=hideEverything     // identical, useless

Make the parameter optional and the difference appears:

@Parameter(title: "Mode") var mode: FocusFilterMode?

Focus ON    perform() mode=Optional(hideEverything)
Focus OFF   perform() mode=nil

nil is the deactivation signal, and it is the only one there is. The same rule governs NocturneFocusFilter.current, which is what makes a pull-based check possible at launch and after sleep: with a default value it kept reporting the configured mode long after the Focus had ended.

So if you build one of these: do not give the parameter a default value to tidy up the picker. You lose the ability to detect the Focus ending, your app engages on both edges and never releases, and the effect stays on forever.

One more measured thing, since it changes how you have to write perform(): macOS calls it more than once per transition. Two calls 588ms apart for a single Do Not Disturb toggle. Whatever you do in there has to be idempotent, or one flip of a switch does the work twice.

Settings also exposes the same switches as System Settings under Menu Bar and Clock Options, so you can drop just the date, just the day, or just AM/PM without touching a mode. The menu bar icon can shimmer on a timer, off by choice, with a 700ms sweep top to bottom. Those are real, and each one is measured:

Each row below adds to the one above it, it is a ladder rather than four independent settings:

About Gone

Gone works, and it is honestly labelled experimental.

It draws a small window over Control Center's clock, re-finding the rect every two seconds so it survives the menu bar reflowing, and tearing itself down in full screen so it never floats over a video. Clicks pass through, so the clock still opens if you hit it.

It leaves a faint seam. The Tahoe menu bar is translucent over your wallpaper, so any window drawn above it blurs an already-translucent layer and tints on top, which always lands darker than the bar. Eight materials were measured against a live bar of rgb(124,106,33):

hudWindow              36.7   <- shipped default
popover                54.7
titlebar               64.5
menu                   65.9
sidebar                77.4
underWindowBackground  77.4
headerView             89.0
windowBackground      110.3

An exact match means sampling real screen pixels, which costs a Screen Recording prompt. Nocturne will not ask for that, because a clock utility has no business holding permission to read your screen. Reading the wallpaper file instead does not work either: the stock Tahoe wallpaper is dynamic, and its first frame decoded to rgb(21,89,153) while the bar on screen was rgb(124,106,33).

Gone turns the clock analog first, so the patch covers 44pt instead of 142pt. A mismatch across 44pt reads as a smudge. Across 142pt it reads as a bug.

If the seam bothers you, use Blind. It is the default for a reason.

Hide everything keeps its own icon lit. Blanking the bar would otherwise hide the one control that turns it back on, so the glyph is redrawn on top of the strip. Clicks pass straight through it to the real status item, so the menu opens normally.

Hide everything has no seam, which is counterintuitive but follows directly from the above. A patch over part of the bar has neighbours it has to match. A patch over the whole bar has none: its only edge is the bar's own bottom edge, which is already a boundary. So the mode that covers the most is the one that looks cleanest.

Getting your clock back

Nocturne adopts your existing Clock Options the first time it runs. It reads whatever you already had set in System Settings and starts from there, rather than imposing its own defaults on you. It also snapshots that state, so Settings can put your Clock Options back as they were.

One honest caveat: restoring always lands on a digital clock. If you were already running the analog menu bar clock before installing Nocturne, you get a digital one back. That is deliberate, because Nocturne's own preferences can be cleared while the clock is analog, and treating that as "original" would restore you to analog permanently.

On its own, Nocturne changes exactly one key: IsAnalog. It only writes the other four when you move a switch in its Settings window yourself.

It restores IsAnalog when you quit, including on pkill and Activity Monitor's Quit. If it ever dies badly and leaves the clock analog:

defaults write com.apple.menuextra.clock IsAnalog -bool false
killall ControlCenter

That is the entire undo, and it needs no app installed to work.

What it does not do

• It does not manage other menu bar items. Hide everything blanks the whole bar, but if you want per-icon control, ordering and hidden sections, that is Ice, which is excellent and does it properly.
• It does not use private APIs, so it will not break on a macOS update.
• It does not ask for Accessibility or Screen Recording.
• It does not phone home, and there is nothing to phone home about.

Why

Built by DotcomJack, who works a day job and builds at night, and got tired of the clock ending the session before the work did.

MIT licensed. Take it apart.