LAlayer8·Oct 14, 2023
Monitorian requires a subscription for hotkeys and CLI, unfortunately.
Twinkle Tray is an alternative: https://github.com/xanderfrangos/twinkle-tray
In Scrollbars are becoming a problemxanderfrangos
twinkle-tray
JavaScript2020–2023
xanderfrangos / twinkle-tray
twinkle-tray
Easily manage the brightness of your monitors in Windows from the system tray
5Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
9.3KGitHub stars
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What it is
Easily manage the brightness of your monitors in Windows from the system tray
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
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HN mentions by year5 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-09-01 23:34:45 UTC to 2023-10-14 08:39:15 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
5 sourcesWell, unfortunately that will never happen because the app would need a full rewrite using DirectX and WinAPI.
Fortunately there’s an open source alternative called TwinkleTray: https://github.com/xanderfrangos/twinkle-tray
Someone determined enough could add adaptive brightness to it. You can even use Lunar’s wireless ambient light sensor [1] for that as it’s simply sending lux values through Server Sent Events [2]
[1] https://lunar.fyi/sensor
[2] https://github.com/alin23/lunarsensor
In HDMI FirewallIt doesn't have ambient light sensing, but I use Twinkle Tray [1] for controlling multiple monitors at once.
It has a time schedule feature, and my hacky-but-functional setup is to have it reduce the brightness a bit every 30 minutes between 5:30 and 9pm -- on my setup it goes 80% to 20%. I have it reset back to 80% before I start using it in the morning.
[1] https://github.com/xanderfrangos/twinkle-tray
In HDMI FirewallI've seen monitors with physical brightness/contrast buttons, but it's a difficult feature to search for. You have to see them in person or maybe look at their manuals before buying.
In the meantime, have you tried the DDC/CI protocol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_Data_Channel)? It's a software protocol for controlling real monitor brightness/contrast (as in, it commands the hardware, not just drawing gray overlays).
Windows: https://github.com/xanderfrangos/twinkle-tray
Mac: https://lunar.fyi/
Linux: https://github.com/ddccontrol/ddccontrol
On my computer, I bound the command line stuff to keyboard shortcuts. But the GUIs these days are probably even easier. I just tried TwinkleTray and it's way faster than using my monitor's hardware buttons and obnoxious OSD interface. And I double-checked that it does indeed change the actual
Read the rest
brightness.
Dunno why operating systems don't just include this out of the box.
Twinkle Tray has a few more features (like a scheduler), and is also FOSS.
https://github.com/xanderfrangos/twinkle-tray
In Lunar – macOS utility to set brightness and volume on external monitors