Look up "good morning screen" and you'll find a stack of guides promising your phone will greet you every time you wake it, weather report included. I tried following a few of them. What you actually get is a clock and a forecast sitting on the lock screen at whatever time you happen to pick the phone up - no actual greeting, no personality, nothing that reads the room. The thing everyone is describing online is more aspirational than real.
My Mac doesn't even get the aspirational version. Close the lid, come back an hour later, open it again, and I'm looking at whatever desktop wallpaper I set two years ago. No time-of-day awareness, no context, nothing that acknowledges I just came back to the machine I spend more hours in front of than my phone.
I went looking for a Mac equivalent before I built one. What I found was a lot of lock screen widget apps and a few screensaver replacements, but nothing that touched the actual wake moment - the half-second between "asleep" and "back to work" where a greeting would actually land. So I built the thing all those guides were promising, for the machine that actually needed it.
Enter Stir
I made Stir because I kept noticing this gap every single time I opened my laptop. It's a menu bar app that shows a greeting overlay the instant your Mac wakes from sleep - lid open, screen wake, whatever triggers it. No configuration required. It just watches for the wake event and shows up.
There are two ways it shows up. Presence mode is a small bubble that appears near the top of the screen and fades out on its own - it doesn't take over anything, you can keep typing right through it. Echo mode is the fullscreen version: dark background, centered text, more of a moment than a notification. I default to Presence during the day and switch to Echo for the first wake of the morning, though that's just my setup.
It's Not Just for Mornings
Here's the thing about the name. "Good Morning screen" is the hook because that's the term people actually type into search, but Stir doesn't stop being useful at noon.
If you connect an AI provider, Stir generates a fresh line every time you wake the machine, not just once a day. Doing great today, welcome back, whatever fits the tone you set. If you'd rather not touch AI at all, you can write your own presets for morning, afternoon, evening, and night, and Stir picks the right one based on the clock - fully offline, no API key needed. And if you close the laptop at 11pm and open it again at 11:40 to check one thing, Quiet Hours (default 10pm to 7am, adjustable) just skips the overlay entirely so it's not shouting a greeting at you in the dark.
Made to Fit, Not Just to Look Nice
The greeting style is its own decision, separate from what it says. Minimal keeps it to a single plain line of text, nothing else on screen. Her leans cinematic and warm, more like a whispered message than a system notification. Terminal renders it like command line output - the tagline is literally $ wake --greet. Graphite and Ivory sit on the calmer, editorial end if you'd rather the whole thing feel quiet instead of decorative.
Each card in the gallery is a full mood, not just a color swap: typography, background, timing, and how the AI is prompted all change together, and the preview panel above it shows the exact greeting style before you commit to one. Free covers 6 of them; the rest sit behind Pro.
Every wake also gets logged with a timestamp, so you can see your streak of consecutive days actually opening your Mac. That part stays local - no cloud sync, no account.
None of this needed to exist. My Mac worked fine without a greeting for years. But once I had it, going back to a blank wake felt like something was missing. Small moment, but it's one that happens every single time you touch the machine, which is more than most features can say.
Stir is free to try. Pro unlocks the rest of the theme gallery, every AI provider, and unlimited wake history.