Every display on your Mac, tuned from the menu bar.

Dimmerly is a free, open-source menu bar app that sets the brightness, warmth, and contrast of each display on your Mac, and turns down an external monitor’s own backlight where the monitor allows it. Save presets and schedules.

Download Dimmerly After you download

macOS 15 Sequoia or later · No tracking in the app

The panel works like the app’s. In the app, the cable icon marks a monitor under hardware control, and its slider turns down the monitor’s own backlight. The desk is illustrated.

Watch the real app do the same 15 seconds

A screen recording of Dimmerly over the same desk: it dims the external display, warms both screens, then sets the whole desk with one preset.

The display controls macOS leaves out.

Night Shift warms every screen at once, and most external monitors hide their brightness behind their own buttons. Dimmerly puts each display within reach of the menu bar.

Control each display separately

Set brightness, warmth, and contrast on one screen without changing the others.

Turn down the monitor itself

Hardware control sets the monitor’s own brightness, contrast, volume, mute, and input over DDC/CI, the control channel in the display cable. A direct DisplayPort or USB-C cable works best. A monitor that doesn’t answer is dimmed in software, so presets and schedules still cover it.

Save complete display setups

Keep the brightness and warmth of every display as one preset, and recall it with a click instead of rebuilding it by hand.

Automate the routine

Apply presets on a schedule, by the clock or at sunrise and sunset, and reach them from global shortcuts, desktop widgets, Shortcuts actions, and Control Center.

Set up the way your displays behave.

Choose display sleep or dim-only mode, set an inactivity timer, and tune automatic warmth in one native Settings window.

Further down the same pane, Hardware Control lists what each external monitor accepts over DDC/CI.

External monitors guide

Dimmerly Displays settings: Sleep and lock or Dim only, auto-dim after 5 minutes of inactivity, automatic color temperature from 6,500 K by day to 2,700 K at night, and Hardware Control showing an external display that accepts brightness, contrast, volume, and input over DDC/CI — Displays settings in the direct-download build.

Get Dimmerly.

Free and open source. Signed by its developer and checked by Apple for malware.

Download Dimmerly macOS 15 Sequoia or later

Version 1.4.2, released 5 November 2026. What’s new

Install with Homebrew

brew tap olujicz/dimmerly
brew install --cask dimmerly

Updates are manual: run brew upgrade --cask dimmerly, or download the new DMG from Releases and replace the app.

After you download

Drag Dimmerly to Applications. Open it from there. The first time, macOS asks whether to open an app from the Internet; choose Open.
Find it in the menu bar. Dimmerly has no window or Dock icon. Click near the clock to open the panel. Can’t see it?
Allow access only if you want it. Global shortcuts need Accessibility permission, and sunrise and sunset schedules use your location unless you enter coordinates. The panel, presets, and hardware control need neither.

The app has no analytics, tracking, or ads. From version 1.5.0 it can check GitHub for updates if you allow it, and the check sends no system profile. This website uses privacy-focused, aggregated Cloudflare Web Analytics. Privacy policy

Get more from every monitor.

How hardware control works, how to run several displays from one panel, what to check when a monitor doesn’t respond, and how Dimmerly compares with other display apps.