NothingHere - A MacOS panic button where one key press cleans your screen
by•
NothingHere is a macOS panic button. One hotkey, three things happen at once:
1. All windows disappear — every app gets hidden instantly
2. All sound goes silent — music, videos, everything mutes
3. A cover document opens — your pre-configured "real work" file
Your screen goes from "definitely not working" to "hard at work" in milliseconds.
Guard Mode sits in your menu bar — when armed, you're always one key press from a clean screen.
Free, open source, ~5.9 MB. macOS 15.0+.
Replies
NothingHere
@solee Muscle memory saves you here. One hotkey to hide windows, mute audio, and open a boring document is the right bundle, and Guard Mode in the&�enu bar makes it feel always ready. A full-screen and Spaces sanity check would make it trustworthy on multi-monitor setups.
NothingHere
@piroune_balachandran Thanks for your suggestions — we'll do more testing and improvements to make this little feature more robust.
Macky
Lol I need this so my boss doesn't see me endlessly doomscrolling on X
NothingHere
@sayuj_suresh It's not just the boss — what annoys me even more are those people with no sense of boundaries who always walk up behind you to see what you're doing.😭
Suberb! nice one.. It's very important for privacy btw| what about when the button click you bring also a screensaver designed by the user himself so it appears instead of all hidden stuff :)
NothingHere
@ayman_elafifi1 Yes, we'll also try to see if we can add an option to open a user-defined program instead of a document.
@solee Aha! .. this is interesting one also
A very simple concept that offers an answer to a very old problem. I might not necessarily be the target group for this, but this still made me think of the many times I was caught red-handed doing something unrelated to work/study.
The genius of this lies in its simplicity, which is very hard to reach. (Might need to get used to this particular hotkey, but it will soon be a part of our muscle memory.)
Incredible light app/widget. I hope to put it to good use in the near future.
P.S. : I honestly think one additional update to this could be the option to enable a particular software application to boot up instead of a particular document. I believe there is scope to extend this app's use case towards general productivity by offering a trigger to instantly switch back to high priority tasks.
NothingHere
@wonderhead_ftw Thanks! Adding the ability to open a specific app is definitely something a lot of people need. We'll get that feature done in our next update.
Termsy
Love the icon! Cute kitty!
And ofcourse, feels damn useful too.
NothingHere
@arungopidas Thanks
Love how simple and practical this is 😄
Curious — since it’s hiding all active windows and muting everything instantly, are there any edge cases where certain apps (like screen recordings or notifications) might still leak through?
Feels like those small things could break the illusion in real scenarios
Ammersive
So bascially command + F3 on mac with a document open behind your browser?
NothingHere
@sam_alexander1 Many people probably aren't familiar with these keyboard shortcuts, and in such a short time you might need to mute everything AND open a document you've prepared in advance — yes, just like I said at the beginning, trying to do all of that at once can get a bit frantic. So I built this app for people who share the same struggle.😄
this gonna be super useful ! awesome
Shopping? Reddit? *pfft not me 🙈lol I really like the new Guard Mode — it would be so awkward having all visuals hidden but that YouTube audio still playing.
NothingHere
@jacklyn_i Thanks for the encouragement! Technically, trying to pause content playing across multiple different apps could fail in some cases. So we went with a simpler approach — just "mute all sound".
Are there still workplaces that actually justify this? 😅
NothingHere
@thefilips Lol, maybe... it's probably not just about work. Sometimes there are annoying people who like to sneak up behind you to see what you're doing, or you're browsing something in your bedroom and someone suddenly opens the door...