[chrismorgan]

It’s hard to change the brightness of desktop monitors. Bafflingly, Windows and macOS don’t support adjusting their brightness the way they do for laptops, despite the existence of DDC/CI to do just that, so you’re left using third-party software if you know about it, or interacting with the awful OSD/buttons on the screen, which you’ll hardly want to do all the time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24316728 is a recent comment chain about this stuff.

[MrGilbert]

For Windows users, I can recommend ClickMonitorDDC[1]. While the UI is a bit cluttered, it has a neat feature:

You can display the current brightness in the notification area, hover over it with your mouse, and use the scroll-wheel to adjust it. I really like it.

[1]: https://clickmonitorddc.bplaced.net/

[GordonS]

I actually think I tried this one yesterday, and from memory it spammed my traybar with about 12 different icons. The UI isn't just cluttered, it's odd!

Still, it's a nice demonstration of what you can do with DDC, and just about anything is better than the crappy physical controls on monitors.

[bllguo]

you can disable them in the settings. it gave me icons for brightness, contrast, saturation, and volume. I only care about setting brightness so I disabled the others

[greggyb]

Thank you! This has been an annoyance for a long time for me. Appreciate the share!

[Skunkleton]

Yep, that is very helpful. Thanks!

[pmontra]

I remember when TV sets and monitors had dials to adjust brightness, contrast and volume. They became useless on TVs because remotes are better, but they'd still be very useful for monitors that stay all the time within reach of the user. Much better than menus.

[skammer]

I recently discovered MonitorControl[0], which is a Mac app that listens to your default brightness and volume keys and pushes updates to all connected monitors over DDC. Extremely happy with it.

[0]: https://github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl

[maven29]

I'll quote an HN discussion from a few weeks ago on why this isn't more prevalent.

>There is a problem with "cheap" monitors and DDC/CI: some of them use EEPROMs to store brightness settings, and this limits you to about 100,000 writes. Worrying about this is the main reason we don't ship DDC/CI with f.lux. (I know that some more modern monitors use NAND and don't have limitations like this.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24344696

[thesandlord]

Another HN comment a few months ago let me discover Twinkle Tray. It's a Windows app that sits in your tray icons.

https://twinkletray.com/

Super cool, you can even link multiple monitors together to control the "global" screen brightness at once.

[TN1ck]

I didn’t like the available offers, so I build my own shitty macOS app for that once, you can get it here: https://github.com/TN1ck/BrightnessChanger

Maybe it interests somebody.

[mjcohen]

Thank you! Works on my 2014 Mac Mini to HP 25f monitor os X 10.13.6.

Did not work through an HDMI switcher but works fine when directly connected.

[formerly_proven]

I dunno. The OSD on Dells is pretty simple. You press the topmost button twice, up/down to adjust, lowest button to save and exit. Since my office has windows, I've been doing this two to four times a day on most days for years. Doesn't bother me too much (it's pretty quick though because I largely only use the 0-40 range, which is about 20-120 nits). On my LG it's even quicker, push the joystick back, then forward/back to change, push in or timeout to save and exit.

Some people say they'd like ambient light sensors, but I'm not sure I'd wanna use something like that. Sometimes I do find the changing brightnesses on mobile devices irritating.

Changing this directly in the OS would be a better UX, though.

[tjoff]

That might work if you only have one display. But on more than one that gets tiresome real quick.

On linux I use ddccontrol to control the brightness on all displays at once (using a simple for loop in the terminal).

I plan to write a script for it that would allow me to bring up a dialog and enter brightness from just a shortcut, but this is good enough til that itch comes.

I'm sure there are alternatives to all operating systems.

[cillian64]

I have a Dell U2415 which is great for this. You can create custom colour/brightness/contrast profiles and assign them to hotkeys. I have one nice bright one for dark terminals or when the sun's out, and a darker lower contrast one for when I have a bright white website or document to read and the office is a bit dimmer. It's two quick button presses to change between these presets.

I think I'd quite like something which adapted brightness and contrast to ambient light as well as the brightness and contrast of what's on screen. With mobile devices this can be a pain as you move around and in and out of shadows, but I feel it could work a lot better on a desktop display. The display could even have the light sensor on its back so it can work out what its backdrop looks like.

[moonbug]

that's a shit-ton of clicks compared to a pair of up/down buttons.

[bserge]

I haven't had a monitor in ~5 years, but the ones I owned had physical buttons for adjusting brightness/contrast/gamma/etc... Do new monitors come with no in-built controls?

[SahAssar]

They do, but the point is that they are usually not as convenient to change as the controls you already have in your hands (mouse + kbd)

[3np]

I paid a significant markup for an Eizo monitor not because I care about the color accuracy and all that but for OSD where I don’t mind adjusting several times a day.

[banach]

For macOS, Lunar does that you want https://lunar.fyi