Stealth Mode

Stealth mode is Dusky’s core invisibility feature. The interview overlay — the window you use during a call — is hidden from screen sharing, the taskbar, the app switcher, and screen recordings.

The dashboard is a separate, ordinary window and is only protected under one specific condition. See Two windows: overlay and dashboard below before you open it during a call.

What stealth mode does (for the overlay)

Feature	Behavior
Screen share	The overlay window is excluded from Zoom, Meet, Teams, and other platforms
Dock / Taskbar	App icon is hidden from the macOS Dock and Windows Taskbar
App switcher	Hidden from Cmd+Tab (macOS) and Alt+Tab (Windows)
Screen recording	Window content is protected and appears blank in recordings
Click-through	Non-interactive areas let mouse clicks pass through to the app below

Toggle visibility

Press Cmd/Ctrl+B to show or hide the interview overlay. Even when visible to you, the overlay remains invisible to screen share. Use Cmd/Ctrl+B to quickly glance at a response, then hide it again.

When the dashboard is open

Cmd/Ctrl+B is not a plain toggle. If the dashboard window is on screen, the shortcut raises and focuses the dashboard instead — it is the way to find Dusky again after it gets buried behind your browser during sign-in. Only when the dashboard is hidden does Cmd/Ctrl+B show or hide the overlay.

When the window is hidden, a small pill appears in the top-right corner of your screen reading ⌘B Show · ⌘? More, reminding you how to bring Dusky back. The pill is itself invisible to screen share and recordings.

How it works

Dusky registers as a screen-share-excluded window at the operating system level. On macOS, this uses the system content protection API. On Windows, Dusky uses the display affinity API to exclude itself from screen capture. Conferencing apps that share your screen through the standard OS capture path honour this flag and skip the window.

The same flag is what makes the window appear blank if a screen recording tool captures the frame.

What the mechanism is — and where it is known to work

There is no per-app allowlist inside Dusky. The overlay sets one operating-system flag — content protection — and every conferencing app sees the same window. So the question is never “does Dusky support Zoom?” but “does this capture method honour the OS flag?”.

It is honoured by the normal screen-share and screen-recording paths on macOS and Windows, which is what Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, Slack huddles, and browser-based conferencing tools use to share your screen.

This is not a guarantee

Windows in particular has several capture methods and support for the flag varies between them. A virtual camera, a hardware capture card, an unusual remote-desktop or monitoring agent, or a phone pointed at your screen can all bypass it entirely — none of those are the OS screen-capture path.

Before an interview that matters, run the two-device test on your own machine, with the app and settings you will actually use: start a screen share, and check the shared view on a second device or with a friend. That is the only result that tells you about your setup.

Testing invisibility

During onboarding, Dusky walks you through an invisibility test:

1. Press Cmd/Ctrl+B to hide the window.
2. Start or join a screen share in your conferencing app.
3. Confirm that Dusky does not appear in the shared view.
4. Press Cmd/Ctrl+B to bring it back.

Re-running the test

The Test Now banner that re-opens this test only appears if you skipped the test during setup. If you completed it, there is currently no in-app way back to it. You can still run the check yourself at any time — hide Dusky with Cmd/Ctrl+B, start a screen share, and confirm on a second device that the overlay does not appear.

Always on — no toggle to forget

Invisibility is not a mode you have to remember to switch on. The interview overlay is screen-share-excluded and content-protected by default, every session. There is no stealth on/off switch to leave in the wrong position before a call.

Two windows: overlay and dashboard

Dusky runs as two windows with different jobs:

• The overlay is the invisible interview companion — frameless, always on top, and excluded from screen capture. This is what you use during a call.
• The dashboard is a normal window used for signing in, onboarding, granting permissions, running the invisibility test, and managing settings and billing. It behaves like any other app window.

The overlay’s invisibility is unconditional. The dashboard’s is not, and the difference matters:

The dashboard is only protected while audio capture is running

“Session” here means audio capture, and nothing else. The dashboard is content-protected only while the microphone is actively capturing — and that protection lifts again the moment the session is paused (for example, after your screen locks).

The consequence: in a screenshot-only round with the microphone off — exactly the coding-interview workflow described in First Interview and Screen Capture — the dashboard is fully capturable, visible in the Dock, and visible in Cmd+Tab for the whole call. Taking a screenshot does not start a session; only Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+A does.

Close the dashboard before you share your screen. Use the overlay during the call and open the dashboard only between rounds. If you need Settings, billing, or sign-in mid-call, assume the dashboard is visible to anyone watching your screen unless audio capture is running.