Shaded, Grey Rectangle on Mac Display

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Shaded, Grey Rectangle on Mac Display

I was playing an MMO, this morning, and while tapping keys, suddenly a grey, shaded rectangle appeared in the lower-left part of my display. I could not get it to go away. (See screen shot)

As far as I know, I have all Accessibility functions turned off. I also have the function keys turned off (set in System Preferences to NOT function as normal function keys).

I was pressing the Command key, the Option key and keys in the upper-left portion of the keyboard (primarily the numbers) when this happened but I may have inadvertently hit function-row keys in the process.

As I said, I could not make it go away, move it around or find any selectable edges or areas to it; I finally had to logout and log back in to cause it to disappear. I tried a number of keystroke combinations and looked in the Keyboard, Display and Accessibility control panels but could see nothing there that seemed to bear on the problem.

Any ideas as to why this happened or what could invoke a rectangle like this? Thanks in Advance for the time and energy you spent considering the matter.

Mac Pro, macOS 10.12

Posted on Mar 10, 2019 2:49 PM

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Pharazir Author

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Mar 11, 2019 12:25 AM in response to Pharazir

I now know what the problem was and am leaving the solution in case it is useful, in one way or another, to others.

The problem was that I had installed a neat little app called ScreenDimmer v1.5, some time ago. It's a nifty little app that allows you to control the brightness of up to three displays, either individually or 'en masse', using the slider in a menbar icon. It has been inexpensive and useful and I recommend it to any one with this configuration.

I believe that, while using the keystroke shortcuts for the MMO I play (Lord of the Rings Online at: https://www.lotro.com/en), I must inadvertently have hit a screen-resize command that caused the shaded rectangle that HAD been covering the secondary display to move to the primary one which, being bigger, was not completely covered by the smaller secondary display's shaded rectangle. Quitting the relaunching ScreenDimmer solved this problem.

I am not sure why the app moved the shade from the secondary display to the proimary one and I'm contacting the dev to report it. But, as I said, this is a great app and I heartily recommend trying ScreenDimmer if you need something of the sort. You can find it at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/screendimmer/id562058942?mt=12

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Shaded, Grey Rectangle on Mac Display

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