How to turn on Night Shift on a Mac
Night Shift shifts your Mac's display toward warmer colors after dark — reducing blue light and making late-night work easier on your eyes. It works on any Mac released in 2015 or later, and it takes about three clicks to enable.
Turn it on from Control Center
The fastest path is through the menu bar. Click the Control Center icon (two toggle switches, top-right corner of the menu bar) → Display → click the Night Shift toggle. The display warms immediately.
From that same Display panel you'll also see a "Display Preferences" link if you want to adjust the warmth intensity or set a schedule without digging into System Settings yourself.
Schedule Night Shift in System Settings
For automatic nightly activation, go to System Settings → Displays → Night Shift. There are three schedule modes:
- Off — Night Shift only runs when you enable it manually.
- Custom — You pick a start and end time. Useful if you keep irregular hours or want it to turn on before sunset.
- Sunset to Sunrise — macOS uses Location Services to calculate the local sunset and sunrise times and switches Night Shift accordingly. This is the most hands-off option.
Below the schedule picker is a Color Temperature slider. Drag it toward "More Warm" for a stronger amber tint, or keep it closer to "Less Warm" if you find the default too orange.
Turn it on temporarily until tomorrow
If you have a schedule set but it's not yet active — say it's 7 PM and your schedule starts at 9 PM — you can jump ahead. In System Settings → Displays → Night Shift, click "Turn On Until Tomorrow." Night Shift activates immediately and then follows your normal schedule from the next day onward. No need to change your schedule just for one evening session.
Is there a Terminal command?
Night Shift is controlled by Apple's private CoreBrightness framework rather than the standard defaults system, so there is no stable defaults write command for it. You may find AppleScript snippets that click through Control Center via osascript, but they are fragile and break across macOS versions. Stick to Control Center or System Settings — both take under ten seconds.
If you need Night Shift as part of a larger automation, the Shortcuts app has a Set Night Shift action you can trigger from a shortcut, a Focus filter, or even the menu bar.
Night Shift vs True Tone vs Dark Mode
These three are often confused because they all change how the display looks:
- Night Shift — shifts the entire display toward warmer (amber) tones on a time schedule. It's a software color filter.
- True Tone — uses ambient light sensors to continuously adapt the display's white balance so that white paper and white pixels look consistent under different lighting. It's not time-based; it reacts to the room.
- Dark Mode — switches the OS color scheme from light backgrounds to dark ones. It doesn't change the display's color temperature at all.
All three work independently. You can run Night Shift and Dark Mode at the same time (many people do), and True Tone operates underneath both.
Mainspring turns dozens of buried macOS settings into one-click, reversible toggles — things like Dark Mode, silencing UI sounds, and hiding desktop icons. Night Shift itself lives in Control Center, but if you're tuning your Mac setup, Mainspring covers a lot of the settings Apple buries in Terminal.
Try Mainspring free →Signed & notarized by Apple · 1-day free trial · $29 once
Turning Night Shift off
To disable Night Shift entirely, go back to System Settings → Displays → Night Shift and set the schedule to Off. Or toggle it off from Control Center for the current session while keeping your schedule intact for tomorrow.
If you enabled it via "Turn On Until Tomorrow," it will turn itself off automatically at sunrise (or at the end time you configured) — you don't need to manually disable it.