Running DisplayLink Manager on Mac without the purple icon

I recently acquired an Elgato Prompter which acts as an additional screen on my Mac. It does this using DisplayLink and the DisplayLink Manager app needs to be running.

A new security feature of the newer macOS versions is that when your screen is being recorded, an icon is displayed in your menu bar. It looks like this and cannot be disabled:

Certainly unmissable!

This icon is displayed nearly all the time DisplayLink Manager is running with my Prompter. Irritatingly it sometimes disappears and reappears which is even worse as my eye is drawn to it.

So I looked for a solution.

As ever, Google is my friend and pointed me to this AltTab issue on GitHub, and more importantly, this comment by @nendonerd.

In the comment, the author builds on previous work in the issue to create a DisplayLink.command file with this shell command:

screen -dmS displaylink arch -arm64 /Applications/DisplayLink\ Manager.app/Contents/MacOS/DisplayLinkUserAgent; killall Terminal

This script starts DisplayLink Manager using screen and then kills Terminal. The use of screen ensures that the app continues to run after Terminal exits.

I created this a /usr/local/bin/displaylink.command and set to executable (chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/displaylink.command). We then need to make it start when you log in. The easiest way is to put it in Login Items within System Settings, but I used Lingon X to make a service that runs on startup.

Now, DisplayLink Manager starts up, but the sharing notification icon doesn’t.

Much better as now the sharing icon is useful to me again.