Different models for color change over the course of day

I can see that this feature might be useful to some people (few people, probably), but I can't see how this could be implemented without needlessly complicating the user interface and/or implementation. Any suggestions?

Actually, you may find this more popular than you might think. This time of year (winter), the monitor screen would change at around 5:00 PM. If you tend to stay up to 11:00 PM, That mean you're looking at a screen with really wrong colors for six hours. That's really way too long. As far as complicating the user interface, I would think of it as a simplification of what you are doing now. Really just a way to specify fixed times to change the screen.

I don't get it, why are you using redshift if you're not going to follow the sun. I find the colors to be quite apropriately reddish from 5 to 11. Much better for my eyes than the default blue light. If you want the switch at fixed times, why not just set up an xgamma script to change the screen at a specific time of the day?

Well, I need it for Windows. But my interest in redshift is to avoid having the monitor color interfere with going to sleep, not necessarily to follow the sun. At least that's the theory.

"If you want the switch at fixed times, why not just set up an xgamma script to change the screen at a specific time of the day?"

How though? I just played around with the xgamma settings, and I couldn't find the appropriate gamma correction to get that relaxing red hue of around 3700K. For a n00b, setting color temperature with xgamma is not trivial -- using Redshift is, however.

I don't know how hard it would be to implement a time setting. Frankly, I don't care about the GUI since it never worked with the versions of Unity/Gnome I've been running, but adding a -time switch to the command line tool would not mess up the user interface, would it?

Also, as the comment above alluded to, this feature is surely more popular than you might think. A lot of people will want to use your program not to follow the light of the sun, but to get more relaxed in the evenings before going to bed. Blue light has been proven to disrupt sleeping patterns.

Lastly, thanks for the tip about xgamma. I didn't know it existed until now, and was just manually invoking Redshift at around 9 pm every day :)

How would you want to specify the times? Something like --time "8:00-22:00", perhaps? Since the transition length is normally derived from solar elevation, this would have to be specified too. Maybe default to one hour.

Sorry for the delay in response.

Yes, your suggested method seems just fine. A default transition length of one hour is perfect.

i like the philosophy behind the current defualt behavior and agree with comment #3 -- from the perspective of our evolution as a species and our physiological health, we are supposed to be following the seasonal sun day/night patterns, and redshift helps remind us when it is "really time to wind down" and helps us in that direction when we so choose while allowing us to retain the choice. it is much more transparent and neutral about reminding us of the actual location, time of day and year.

@ethanay: I would not use the feature either, but I've had several requests for it. I will not implement it myself but if anybody writes a good patch (with the --time option as discussed above) I will include it.

I also find this feature. Here in Finland sun is pretty low most of the year. Currently it's 12:23 and redshift makes my monitor visibly red. I'd be happy if i could configure RS not to modify colors until set time.