PolyHalo

PolyHalo adds a subtle color-coded halo — a thin border with a soft inward gradient and a delicate colored shadow — around your Mac windows, so you can recognize what context a window is without reading its title, contents, icon, or account name. Most window utilities answer “which window is active?” PolyHalo answers “what context is this window?”

Two copies of the same app. Two different halos.

The killer feature: run two copies or profiles of the same app and give each its own halo. PolyHalo tells real instances apart by their launch context (a separate --user-data-dir / profile, with a bundle-path fallback), so the color follows the right copy — and persists across restarts.

Color is context

workMessenger — team workspace

personalMessenger — personal account

prodDashboard — production

testDashboard — staging

Stop mixing up identical windows

Same icon, same app name, same interface — easy to mix up. PolyHalo reduces the small, costly mistakes:

• Sending a work message to a personal chat.
• Writing in the wrong account, or sharing from the wrong profile.
• Deploying to production instead of test.
• Closing the wrong window, or confusing two clients or projects.

A halo, not a distraction

• Per-app & per-instance colors — assign a halo to an application, or to a specific running copy.
• Calm by design — fades in on appear, follows windows while moving, never covers content, and doesn't steal clicks (only the tiny corner grip is clickable).
• In-place color picker — a small grip in each window's top-right corner opens its color menu.
• Smart occlusion — the halo is clipped behind other windows, panels, menus, and the Dock.
• Dark-mode aware — halos auto-dim in dark mode so saturated colors don't glare.
• Settings — launch at login, show/hide grips, border thickness, reset assignments.

Built for people with too many identical windows

Multiple accounts and browser profiles, client workspaces, messengers and dashboards, prod / test / staging, terminal and IDE workflows — anywhere identical-looking windows pile up.

Native by design

• Window geometry comes from the public CGWindowList API; the halo is drawn in a transparent overlay window below the Dock level, so the compositor handles occlusion.
• No Accessibility permission and no private APIs. Runs as a quiet menu-bar agent — no Dock icon, no main window.
• Local-only: colors and assignments stay on your Mac.

Active-window highlighters show where your focus is. PolyHalo shows what context you're in.