Live data from Hacker News

MonitorControl: Control external monitor brightness and volume on your Mac

github.com

61–70 of 89 posts

Re: MonitorControl: Control external monitor brightness and volume on your Mac

#61
post #26

Happy to see this app mentioned on HN. If you have Swift experience please check the issues of the repo. Need assistance with the identical monitors issue, it’s there for two years already.

You could try Lunar[1] for that issue. It supports any number of monitors and contains a workaround that seems to also work with multiple identical monitors that can't be uniquely identified through their EDID data.

There are still some issues with some multiple port docks but so far that only turned out to be hardware related.

I'm the developer of Lunar so feel free to ask any questions about it.

[1] https://lunar.fyi

Re: MonitorControl: Control external monitor brightness and volume on your Mac

#62

This is too awesome! Adjusting the brightness of my monitor has been a pain especially at night since WFH. Does this work with dynamic lighting?

You could try Lunar[1] for that. It syncs your builtin monitor brightness to all your external monitors. As long as you have adaptive brightness enabled on your Macbook, the external monitors will also be adaptive.

[1] https://lunar.fyi

Re: MonitorControl: Control external monitor brightness and volume on your Mac

#63

For a command-line option, ddcctl ( https://github.com/kfix/ddcctl ) works nicely in my experience, with a Dell Ultrasharp connected via USB-C. I have a script hacked together to fetch the internal display's brightness once a minute and apply it, with a scaling factor, to the external, so that they're both effectively controlled by the laptop's ambient light sensor. It's really nice for working in a room with lots of…

Thanks for mentioning Lunar! I'm the developer of the app.

I've had a lot of feedback on it and users really helped me to fix most of the use cases so please give it a try. It has a lot of options to make it work just the way you want.

And if it doesn't, feel free to send me feedback. I'm still developing new features for it like weather aware adaptive brightness (for less brightness on those cloudy days), an external USB light sensor (for Mac Minis, clamshell mode Macbooks or even Hackintoshes) and a new curve fitting algorithm to better adapt the 0-100 curve when you adjust the brightness manually.

Re: MonitorControl: Control external monitor brightness and volume on your Mac

#64
post #13
post #8

Great codebase. I stumbled on this while trying to figure out how to programmatically control screen brightness in a macOS app. Turns out that this is far more difficult than imagined. Even controlling just the built-in screen, something I assumed would be included in Apple's libraries, was not included. The source code in MonitorControl is very well written and commented and helped me catch the mistakes I was doing…

Doing anything on macOS is more difficult than I imagine it to be. For example, writing an alt-tab-type app, enumerating the list of apps and their windows. Good luck.

If you haven't figured this out yet, I'd maybe look into the code behind https://www.hammerspoon.org/docs/hs.window.switcher.html.

Re: MonitorControl: Control external monitor brightness and volume on your Mac

#65
post #46

Sometimes I just wonder why does apple don't provide such a basic features/necessities.

If you have a touch bar it does, in my experience. Tap the brightness button to open up controls for each monitor.

I have touchbar, it only sets brightness of laptop, not external

Re: MonitorControl: Control external monitor brightness and volume on your Mac

#66

I have often wondered if you could exploit a monitor over the DDC bus sending i2c commands. There have just got to be memory corruption bugs in the display controller code. They probably also typically have some flash memory, so perhaps one could permanently reprogram a monitor after the exploit?

Could monitors be malicious and exploit vulnerabilities in computers by sending corrupted data over the DDC bus?

The crazy thing is that computers send +5V over the DDC bus to the monitor so that they are able to read data even if the monitor is powered off and not connected to the mains! So, simply connecting something to the computer's display port could be enough.

Re: MonitorControl: Control external monitor brightness and volume on your Mac

#68

For a command-line option, ddcctl ( https://github.com/kfix/ddcctl ) works nicely in my experience, with a Dell Ultrasharp connected via USB-C. I have a script hacked together to fetch the internal display's brightness once a minute and apply it, with a scaling factor, to the external, so that they're both effectively controlled by the laptop's ambient light sensor. It's really nice for working in a room with lots of…

Could you share the script? I think lots of people would find it very useful!

Re: MonitorControl: Control external monitor brightness and volume on your Mac

#69

For a command-line option, ddcctl ( https://github.com/kfix/ddcctl ) works nicely in my experience, with a Dell Ultrasharp connected via USB-C. I have a script hacked together to fetch the internal display's brightness once a minute and apply it, with a scaling factor, to the external, so that they're both effectively controlled by the laptop's ambient light sensor. It's really nice for working in a room with lots of…

Could you share the script? I think lots of people would find it very useful!

[deleted]
Post reply on HN