Put your Mac display in negative

· 1 minute read · via Masoni Raves About

Today’s is kind of a mini-tutorial, but it’s one that I think is pretty cool. Mac OS X has a feature that is meant for those who have trouble seeing contrast or are color blind or have some kind of visual problem that inverts the colors of your Mac’s display.

Hit Ctrl Option ⌘ 8 to invert your display1, and hit the same buttons to put it back to normal. Check out the menu bar and its drop-down menus in negative: reminds me of some Linux theme. It’s more dramatic if you have the Aqua theme turned on rather than Graphite (System Preferences → Appearance), because blues become yellows while grays are still grays.

Well, have as much fun with that one as you can.2

  1. Update from June 29, 2008. On new Apple keyboards, the Apple key is now the ⌘ key. ↩︎

  2. Update from July 19, 2026. At some point over the past 18 years, this hotkey no longer works. But the same option is available on macOS 26 and later by navigating to System Settings → Accessibility → Display → Invert Colors. ↩︎