a quiet macOS app

Hush the noise.
Reclaim your focus.

Hush waits in your menu bar and quietly closes the apps you stopped using. Your Mac stays cool. Your battery lasts longer.¹² Your attention stays put.³

Download for Mac 1.0 beta · 2.2 MB View source

how it works

Four small habits, on autopilot.

Focus sessions

25 (Pomodoro), 50 (Deep Work), or 90 minutes (one ultradian cycle). Hush kills the noise the second you press start. Trigger from anywhere with ⌥⌘H.

Idle quitting

Pick a timeout. Untouched apps quit themselves. No more 47 windows you meant to close last Tuesday.

Battery aware

Drop below your threshold and Hush halves the idle time. Your battery stretches noticeably further.

Sleep & Focus mirror

Lid closes? Display sleeps? macOS Focus turns on? Hush takes the cue and tidies up for you.

why hush

Less noise, by design.

RAMLess memory. Background apps you forgot are quietly retired.¹
batteryLess drain. No rogue processes burning cycles overnight.²
focusFewer distractions. Open what you need. Hush handles cleanup.
privacyNo telemetry. No accounts, no servers, no data leaves your Mac.

the science of focus

Why short blocks actually work.

Hush's defaults aren’t arbitrary — they line up with four decades of research on attention, interruption, and ultradian alertness. The 25/50/90 minute sessions map cleanly onto the literature.

23 min 15 sec
average time to fully refocus after a single interruption.
Mark, Gudith & Klocke — The Cost of Interrupted Work, CHI 2008
25 + 5
the original Pomodoro cadence: a focused block, then a short break. Hush’s 25-minute session is one Pomodoro.
Francesco Cirillo — The Pomodoro Technique, 1987
attention residue
switching tasks leaves “leftover” attention on the previous one, measurably degrading what you do next.
Sophie Leroy — Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?, 2009
~90 min cycle
human alertness rises and falls in roughly 90-minute ultradian rhythms — the basic rest-activity cycle.
Nathaniel Kleitman — basic rest-activity cycle, 1960s

Ready for a quieter Mac?

Download Hush 1.0 beta 2.2 MB · macOS 13+

Memory. macOS exposes per-process resident memory through proc_pidinfo(PROC_PIDTASKINFO) (field pti_resident_size) and task_info(TASK_VM_INFO) (phys_footprint). Hush samples the former directly; Activity Monitor’s “Memory” column reads the latter.
Energy. Per-task energy and idle wakeups are accounted in the Mach kernel via task_power_info_v2 and proc_pid_rusage(RUSAGE_INFO_V4) (ri_pkg_idle_wkups, ri_billed_energy). Activity Monitor’s “Energy Impact” is a derived view of these counters. Apple acknowledged background-app battery drain explicitly when shipping App Nap in OS X 10.9 (2013); see Energy Efficiency Guide for Mac Apps, Apple Developer Documentation.
Attention. Mark, G., Gudith, D. & Klocke, U. (2008). The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress. CHI ’08. Leroy, S. (2009). Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work? The Challenge of Attention Residue When Switching Between Work Tasks. Org. Behav. Hum. Decis. Process. 109(2), 168–181. Cirillo, F. (1987/2018). The Pomodoro Technique.

a note on the beta

Hush 1.0 is ad-hoc signed, so on first launch macOS will warn you. Right-click the app in /Applications, choose Open, then Open again — it’s a one-time gesture.

Source is on GitHub, MIT-licensed. Found something off? open an issue.

Hush the noise. Reclaim your focus.