Redshift Tray

Redshift Tray by ltGuillaume
Redshift by Jon Lund Steffensen

Overview

Redshift Tray is a no-frills GUI for the excellent screen temperature adjustment tool Redshift by Jon Lund Steffensen. Redshift Tray allows you to:

• Control Redshift based on location or custom night/day times
• Quickly enable/disable Redshift: double-click the tray icon
• Force a full nighttime temperature adjustment, no matter what the actual time is
• Pause the temperature adjustment for x minutes
• Adjust the screen brightness and forced temperature via hotkeys
• Optionally update your current coordinates every time you enable Redshift (e.g. when traveling)
• Use a fantastic set of extra hotkeys that have got nothing to do with Redshift
• Make use of Remote Desktop: Redshift hotkeys will stay active locally, while Redshift Tray can also run on the remote system for its extra hotkeys

It also includes a set of extra hotkeys. Admittedly, these are entirely based on my personal preferences, but since this program is put together in AutoHotkey, it’s easy to add your own hotkeys and remove the ones you think are rubbish.

List of hotkeys

Getting started

1. Download Redshift Tray from the releases page and extract it to a folder for which your user account has writing permissions. Alternatively, you can install it with Chocolatey or with Scoop (scoop bucket add extras, then scoop add redshift-tray).
2. Run rstray.exe and you’ll see a handsome icon pop up in the notification area next to your clock. Now right-click it and choose Settings. You can quickly switch some features on/off, or choose More Settings. The text file rstray.ini that shows up in your editor contains all the settings for Redshift Tray.
   • For accurate coordinates, you can set them yourself, otherwise it uses your IP and the ipapi service (one time only). Use a search engine, Maps, Wikipedia, or whatever and jot down your coordinates behind latitude and longitude.
   • During the day, the color temperature should match the light from outside, typically around 5500K-6500K. The light has a higher temperature on an overcast day. Redshift assumes that your screen will produce light at a color of 6500K when no color correction is applied by the program. Thus, 6500K is the neutral temperature. The daytemp setting helps you set this value (e.g. daytemp=6500).
   • At night, the color temperature should be set to match the lamps in your room. This is typically a low temperature at around 3000K-4000K. The nighttemp setting helps you out here (e.g. nighttemp=3500).
   • Redshift Tray can check if the active window is in full-screen mode and automatically switch to a different color temperature (useful for image viewers and video players). Set the fullscreentemp to your preferred value and enable this feature with fullscreenmode=1
   • You can temporarily disable Redshift’s color adjustment for a few (or a whole lotta) minutes. Set the amount of those hella blue minutes with the pauseminutes setting.
   • If you want total control over the times at which Redshift will be enabled and disabled, just set nighttime=1800 and daytime=0600, where the values depict 24h military time. Then, set customtimes=1.
   • If you get annoyed by the fact that your mouse cursor does not assume the same color temperature, set colorizecursor=1 and Redshift Tray will write MouseTrails=-1 to HKCU\Control Panel\Mouse in your registry to fix this. You'll need to save and exit the config file, then restart Windows or log off to get this working.
   • The setting hotkeys=1 will enable the set of hotkeys, while (big surprise) hotkeys=0 disables them. Similarly, you can control the extra set of hotkeys with the entry extrahotkeys.
   • With keepbrightness=1 you can apply the brightness setting even when you disable the gamma adjustment (when paused or disabled). This could help if your monitor starts humming or flickering with a low backlight brightness. You will lose some "color space", though.
   • If you have loaded an ICC profile or have done a custom display calibration (Control Panel > Color Management > Advanced), Redshift might interfere with this. As such, you can set keepcalibration=1 to have Redshift Tray keep that into account. This will, however, require Redshift Tray to run as administrator (it will take care of that for you).
   • If you loathe the fading transition upon start-up, just set notransitions=1.
   • If you're a Remote Desktop addict like me, be sure to set remotedesktop=1. This way, you can run this gem in both environments, switch between local and remote sessions by double-tapping RCtrl, and change the local Redshift settings while in a remote screen.
   • I often continue a session remotely via a laptop without numeric keypad. Once I return to the system and log on locally, I want the NumLock state to be enabled again. rdpnumlock=1 will take care of this.
   • If you don't want Redshift to be enabled on start-up (because you just want to use the fancy hotkeys, for example), set startdisabled=1.
   • If you want to use the optional (default and/or extra) hotkeys when a program that runs as admin (has elevated privileges) is the active window, set runasadmin=1 so that Redshift Tray will try to run as admin, too. If this scenario doesn’t really occur on your system, leave the damn thing alone.
   • Traveling with your laptop? You can set traveling=1 after which the coordinates will be updated every time Redshift is enabled. It'll keep its mouth shut if there's no Internet connection, though. Since the location is based on your IP, don't use this when a VPN is active.
3. Now save the settings file and close it. Redshift Tray will restart with the settings you’ve defined.
4. If you’d like Redshift Tray to automatically run at startup, right-click the tray icon again and click Autorun under Settings, so that this option is checked. This setting just creates or removes a value in the registry key HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run.
5. If Redshift fails to adjust the color temperature, or the brightness level gets stuck at a certain percentage, import unlock-gammarange.reg into the registry and restart Windows.

You. Are. Done!

Credits

• Icon created from a damn good design by Layton Diament
• AutoHotkey, a scripting language for desktop automation by Chris Mallet and others.
• Redshift by Jon Lund Steffensen
• Chocolatey package by tunisiano187
• Scoop package by Ash258, r15ch13 and linsui