Your desktop folds away as you close the lid. Free, open source, forever.
A free alternative to Bendy. No license keys, no seat limits, no account, no telemetry. MIT licensed.
Install
-
Download
Clamshell-0.1.0.dmgbelow and drag Clamshell to Applications. -
Clear the download quarantine flag, because the app is signed but not notarised:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Clamshell.app
Right-click ▸ Open works too. Only needed once.
-
Launch it, grant Screen Recording when asked, then relaunch once.
The laptop icon in the menu bar is the interface.
Requirements
- macOS 14 Sonoma or later
- A MacBook with a lid angle sensor. Every Apple silicon MacBook has one, as do Intel MacBook Pros from 2019 on. Verified on an M2 MacBook Air.
- Anything else still runs it, falling back to a looping demo so you can see and tune the effect.
What it does
Reads the hinge angle from the Mac's own sensor at hundredths of a degree, captures the desktop with ScreenCaptureKit, and bends it in Metal to match — tilting it back on the hinge, softening it as it goes, and letting the corners and top fall into black.
Three styles, tunable depth, blur, shadow, engage angle and opening animation length. Idles at well under one percent CPU with no capture stream running; a frame costs about 1.4 ms at full Retina resolution.
Nothing is recorded, uploaded or written to disk, and there is no network code in the app.
Building it yourself
No Xcode needed, just the Command Line Tools:
git clone https://github.com/danielradosa/clamshell.git
cd clamshell
make setup