mnpaper

A soft paper texture that settles over every monitor.

It lays a warm, procedurally generated sheet over the whole screen, so the display stops reading as backlit glass. E-ink mode goes further and turns everything into a greyscale reader view with shade, contrast and dither controls.

Download mnPaper.exe Source

Local and free. No telemetry, no analytics, no account. The first run may show a SmartScreen warning because the exe is not code-signed yet.

Warm pulp over cold light

The texture is generated rather than taken from a photograph: blotches, pulp fleck and fine grain, repeated across the screen. Paper mode keeps the texture at full resolution for each monitor and costs near-zero CPU while nothing is changing.

Paper mode — roughly 40 MB per monitor GDI layered window, no GPU

Material

Surface Paper or greyscale e-ink, and how warm the sheet reads.

Warmth 28

cool greylamplight

Sheet tone

Grain How strongly the fibre texture shows through the ink.

Grain 45

flatcoarse

Fibre 30

smoothlong strands

E-ink Shades, contrast and the dither that fills the gaps between them.

Shades 4

two toneseight tones

Contrast 128

softhard

Keys and the tray

Ctrl+Alt+P toggles the texture. Ctrl+Alt+E switches between paper and e-ink mode, and turns the effect on if it was off. Everything else lives in the settings window or the tray menu.

Settings live in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\mnPaper. Quitting from the tray and deleting the exe is the whole uninstall.

Cost of each mode

Paper: about 40 MB per monitor, because the texture is held in memory at full resolution. Near-zero CPU while nothing changes. No GPU — it draws with plain GDI.

E-ink: memory scales with total screen area, since it keeps five full-desktop buffers plus one texture per monitor — about 120 MB on a 2880×1800 desktop. Still near-zero CPU at rest, but it adds one small Direct3D 11 desktop-duplication setup on the GPU, which is how it reads the screen in order to restyle it.

Screenshots

The texture can be hidden from screenshots and screen shares with a checkbox, so the crisp original reaches whoever is watching. In e-ink mode it is always hidden from captures, because desktop duplication would otherwise capture its own output and feed it back in.

So the honest statement is: paper mode gives you the choice, e-ink mode does not.

Where it stops

The secure desktop stays untextured — the login screen, Ctrl+Alt+Del and UAC prompts. Windows forbids drawing there by design.
Start menu, search and the notification centre run in shell bands an ordinary app cannot enter.
The taskbar is your choice: Cover puts it under the paper, Not cover keeps its buttons crisp.
The settings window keeps a fixed-size layout, so it looks small on a high-DPI screen, though every control still fits.
E-ink mode can shimmer on content-heavy screens at low shade counts.

Privacy

No telemetry, no analytics, no accounts. Outbound network is limited to updating: a version-file check about once a day, which you can turn off, plus a manual check and the download itself — and that only happens after you confirm the prompt. Downloads come over HTTPS and are verified against a published SHA-256 fingerprint before anything is replaced. If anything fails, nothing is changed.