Menu bar app · macOS 13+

Stay green. Quietly.

You step away to think. Slack puts a moon on you. Teams calls you idle. Discord says you ghosted. Greendot keeps your dot green while you're gone — and has the good sense to clock out at night, so you don't end up suspiciously green at 1 AM.

See how it works

macOS 13+ · 1.2 MB · No accounts · No tracking

Acme · #general · SlackActive
# general· 24 members4 online
DL
Devon Lee9:32 AM
hey — did the deploy finish?
YO
You9:34 AM
yep, just pushed the fix. CI's green.
MA
Marco T.9:35 AM
nice one. shipping it.
Message #general
Finder
9:41
Greendot — Active
Disable
Idle threshold
30 seconds
1 minute
5 minutes
10 minutes
Active hours
Restrict to active hours
From: 9 AM
Until: 6 PM
Session: 3h 12m
Jiggles: 27
Prevented sleep: 4×
Launch at Login
Quit Greendot⌘Q

why though?

Three reasons
this exists.

  1. 01

    Because thinking is part of the job.

    Some of your best work happens away from the keyboard — reading, walking, sketching, staring at a wall. The dot doesn't know that. Greendot keeps it green so the next 1:1 is about your output, not about why you went yellow on a Wednesday afternoon.

  2. 02

    Because the other jigglers will get you caught.

    Dumb mouse-movers keep wiggling while you're presenting. Cursor jitters mid-demo. Cursor jumps during the Zoom. Greendot watches your mic and camera, so the moment you're on a call it shuts up — and nobody sees the trick.

  3. 03

    Because your trackpad is not a fidget toy.

    Nudging your hand every four minutes to keep your name green is theater you have to perform. Greendot performs it for you — two pixels, then back, at the latest possible moment. You get your hand back for, you know, work.

People actually like a little dot.

A handful of folks quietly running Greendot in their menu bar. Here's what they said when we asked.

"My 1:1s used to start with 'I noticed you went yellow yesterday afternoon.' Now they start with 'what shipped this week?'"
Renée H.Backend, fintech
"Other jigglers kept twitching my cursor during screen-shares. Greendot stops the second my mic opens. Nobody on my team has spotted it."
Marco T.Staff eng
"I installed it six months ago and haven't touched a setting since. The dot is just always green."
Sina K.Designer
"On a normal Tuesday my Slack used to go 'away' six times. With Greendot, zero. Same amount of work shipped."
Devon L.PM
"I was bracing for a settings panel and a dashboard. There's just a small menu in the menu bar. That's all I wanted."
Priya R.Frontend
"I do my best thinking on long walks. I used to come back to a yellow dot. Now I come back to green."
Wes M.Founder, 2-person startup

knows when to stop →

It knows when your mic is hot.

The whole thing falls apart the moment your colleague watches your cursor twitch by itself in the corner of a screen-share. So Greendot doesn't let that happen. Your mic opens, your camera opens — it shuts up immediately.

The icon shifts to a paused state. Nothing happens. Then your call ends. Then it picks up where it left off. Nobody saw a thing.

  • Listens to CoreAudio + CMIO at the system level — no app integrations needed.
  • Catches Zoom, Meet, FaceTime, Loom, Photo Booth, Audacity, Logic — anything that opens the input.
  • Resumes the moment you hang up. No taps, no setting changes, no relaunch.
Sprint sync — ZoomREC · 00:18:42
YO
You
MA
Marco
SI
Sina
WE
Wes
DE
Devon
PR
Priya
Finder
9:41
paused

← this little guy

IDLE 04:01— nudge sent
zzz
+2 PXthen back.
Finder
9:41
Greendot
StatusHolding green
Idle threshold
30 seconds
1 minute
5 minutes
10 minutes
Quit Greendot⌘Q
✱ two pixels. then back.

← thinking, not absent

A nudge, not a wiggle.

When you've actually been idle for a while — reading, walking, thinking, doing the work the dot can't see — Greendot moves your cursor by two pixels and immediately puts it back. Every app on your laptop registers activity. Your screen never moves. Your dignity stays intact.

And because it holds a power-management assertion at the OS level, your display doesn't dim. Not because we're rude — because we know the screensaver kicking in is the second thing that gets you grey'd out.

  • Pick your idle threshold — 30 seconds, 1, 2, 5, 10, or 30 minutes. The default is one minute.
  • Throttled to once per threshold. We're not jittering — we're whispering.
  • Uses real CGEvent taps so macOS treats it as genuine input. Not warp tricks.

8:59 PM →

On the clock. Off the clock.

Set your work hours. After 6:00 PM, Greendot clocks out with you. Because the most obvious tell of all is a dot that's still green at 11 PM on a Tuesday.

And on Saturday morning, when you wake the laptop to add one more item to the grocery list, your name doesn't ping up as "active" to thirty colleagues. The dot stays grey. Your weekend stays your weekend.

tip:overnight ranges work too — e.g. 22 → 06 for the night shift.
Greendot Schedule
Tue · Mar 18
↑ 8:47 PM
6 AM9 AMNoon3 PM6 PM11 PM
Off dutyOutside work hoursresumes 9:00 AM tomorrow
Finder
8:47
Active hours
Restrict to active hours
From
8 AM
9 AM
10 AM
Until
5 PM
6 PM
7 PM
10 PM

read your menu bar

Four moods. One green dot.

The icon in your menu bar tells you exactly what Greendot is doing right now. Glance up. Know. Move on.

Off
I'm not doing anything.

You disabled it. The icon is a slash. Greendot is fully out of the picture until you turn it back on.

Standby
You're at the keyboard.

Greendot is enabled and watching, but you're actively using the machine — no nudges needed, no theater. Just an outlined circle.

Paused
Your mic or cam is live.

Greendot detected a call and quietly stepped aside. Dashed outline. Resumes the moment your input device frees up.

Holding
Keeping you green.

You're idle, in work hours, off any call. Greendot is the reason your dot is green right now — and it's the only state shown in real color.

a note from

the person who built this

Hi,

Some companies judge you by output. Others judge you by how hard you appear to be working. I'm built for the first kind — I'd rather ship the right thing in two hours than the wrong thing in eight.

The trouble is that "how hard you appear to be working" gets distilled, eventually, into the color of a little circle next to your name in Slack. And the people who do their best thinking in the time between the typing — the walks around the block, the page of paper notes, the ten minutes of staring at the ceiling — are exactly the people whose dots go yellow first.

I'm not going to type more or click more, and I'm not buying a clumsy mouse jiggler that twitches through my Zoom calls. So I built a quieter one. Greendot does the smallest possible thing — two pixels, then back — only when you've genuinely been idle. It shuts up on calls. It clocks out at night. No account, no telemetry, no dock icon. A 1.2 MB binary and a tiny menu.

Work smarter. Let Greendot handle the looking-harder part.

— Peter

built Greendot · still in the menu bar

One-time · $5

Stay green. While you think.

No account. No analytics. No dock icon. No nag screens. Just a tactful little circle for people who do their best work away from the keyboard.

macOS 13+ · Apple Silicon & Intel · 1.2 MB