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waydabber
BetterDisplay
Learning & Reference2021–2026
waydabber / BetterDisplay

BetterDisplay

Unlock your displays on your Mac. Flexible HiDPI scaling, XDR/HDR extra brightness, virtual screens, DDC control, image adjustments, PIP/streaming, EDID override. More info - betterdisplay.pro/guide

Learning & ReferenceCreative & MediaMobile & Desktop
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
36Distinct people
42Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
34.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Unlock your displays on your Mac. Flexible HiDPI scaling, XDR/HDR extra brightness, virtual screens, DDC control, image adjustments, PIP/streaming, EDID override. More info - betterdisplay.pro/guide

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

I've been using 42" 4K TVs as my monitor for like 10 years now. 2 years ago I upgraded to an OLED LG A1 and it has been amazing. https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/lg/a1-oled…

m_ke used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 10:02:05 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year42 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2021-11-01 08:30:54 UTC to 2026-03-30 13:54:50 UTC.

0369122021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 1 submissions, 4 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 1 submissions, 7 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 0 submissions, 11 comments20232024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 3 submissions, 8 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC514
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC817
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC11011
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1138
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413

What Hacker News says

5 sources
d3nj4l·Dec 28, 2021
I have a bit of a messy setup due to availability issues and price fluctuations with the recent shortages. Currently, I'm using one LG UltraFine 4k display at 27" - it's beautiful, text looks super crisp and it works perfectly fine out of the box with my MBP. For a secondary display I use a 1440p BenQ which has been a source of pain with macOS, because macOS doesn't play well with 1440p displays. To make it work without looking like garbage I use betterdummy [1], but this also has the side effect of requiring a lot more window management that I sort of scripted with hammerspoon. It's really not a good time to get a monitor for a macbook: the onboard display on the new ones is gorgeous and very little on the market comes close at a reasonable price point. This recent article [2] goes into the dismal state of affairs better than I can put h
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ere. If you're just getting into external monitors and have a pretty large budget, I would recommend the LG UltraFine 5k specifically for its ability to have a single cable work for display + power + USB-C hub. I wish I could get one but they're heavily marked up here in India. 1: https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDummy 2: https://www.caseyliss.com/2021/12/7/monitor-liss
In Ask HN: What display(s) are you using these days?
Benjamin_Dobell·Nov 23, 2021
Chiming in to say I've also got an M1 Max. I was running High Sierra until I got my M1 with Monterey. Holy heck! If you've been updating gradually, maybe you didn't notice. But woweee stability is a train-wreck now. Issues I've reported via Feedback Assistant: 1. Issue waking external displays. Typically 10+ seconds to wake my HDMI display, Thunderbolt is faster, but still a bit slow. Slow wake of external displays might sound like a minor issue, and it is. What's not a minor issue is having all my windows slammed on top of each other on the Macbook's built-in display every time I wake from sleep. 2. No scaling for external non-4K monitors. I've got a 1440p 144Hz display, my options are tiny text, pixelated large text (decreased resolution) or install a third-party work around (https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDummy). The third-party wo
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rk around breaks screen recording. Seems there's another bug in macOS where you can't use display mirroring and record screen at once - it crashes the screen capture tool. 3. Unresponsive Finder. Sometimes I can't drag and drop files. The rest of the UI works, but you cannot click and drag. No idea why. 4. Black screen (with cursor only) after wake from sleep. Think this is somehow related to clamshell mode, as I believe it enabled briefly when I plugged external displays in before opening the lid. Had to hard reset. 5. Audio popping. System wide. Interestingly there's no category for reporting sound issues in Feedback Assistant. Pretty crazy when you think about modern Apple's origins. Seems this is a pretty wide-spread issue. Theories I've seen have been related to Rosetta. However, I can confirm that arm64 binaries (e.g. Firefox) do occasionally lead to popping, but it may be that Intel binaries are running at the same time. It comes and goes. It's almost certainly a driver issue, doesn't sound like bad speakers, sounds like corrupt buffers. Issues I haven't reported: 1. Text boxes not being responsive. As in, you can't click in them. I don't know if this is somehow related to the Finder issue. It may well be app specific, hence why I haven't reported it. However, I've observed it in Firefox and Jetbrains products. 2. Garbled rendering, particularly around fonts. Again, might be app specific. Main culprit is Slack. Restarting the app doesn't fix it, rebooting does though. There's probably more that I'm forgetting. Honestly, this is a bit depressing. The M1 is a beast. If I worked on Apple's hardware team I'd be pretty peeved, because they've achieved something amazing and cruddy software is compromising the entire experience.
In Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max
waydabber·Nov 13, 2021
MonitorControl is an app to control the brightness and volume of your external display like it was a native Apple display (via the native Apple keys showing the native OSD). The new 4.0.0 version was recently released and has a huge amount of new features compared to previous versions (even though v3.x.x was alerady a feature packed release). App development was supercharged recently - if you did not try MonitorControl or you last tried version 2 or 3 (the latter was released this September), check it out! Some new stuff among other things: - Complete overhaul of the menu UI with Big Sur/Monterey Control Center style sliders. - New combined hw-sw brightness algorithm that is closer then ever to the Apple native feeling. - Smooth brightness transitions. - A lot of customization options and tweakable DDC settings for advanced users. - Fully
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supports virtual displays (DisplayLink, Sidecar etc) and non-hardware dimming. - Custom keyboard shortcuts (+ of course native Apple keys) - Brightness syncing from the built-in display - Compatibility with BetterDummy https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDummy + all the improvements of v3 (Apple Silicon support etc). The app is free and open source. :)
In MonitorControl 4: use your 3rd party monitor as it was an Apple display for free

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