r/osx • u/Gabcdefga • 2d ago

Here's my open source app for controlling external displays on macOS

Here's an app I've built on the side (of course w/ AI) but I see daily.

DisplayWave is a menu bar app for external monitors on macOS. It does a handful of things:

- Turn monitors off and on without unplugging them, listed by name. The monitor loses signal and goes to standby.

- Brightness and color temperature per monitor. It changes the real backlight over DDC when the monitor supports it, and dims on the GPU when it doesn't (common with docks and some HDMI ports).

- Presets for brightness and warmth, and layouts that save your arrangement, main display, resolution and refresh rate.

- Keep Mac Awake, and Blackout, which turns every screen dark while the Mac keeps running. Any key or click brings them back.

Why: I used MonitorControl for a long time. It's great for brightness, but I also wanted to turn monitors off and warm them up in the evening. BetterDisplay does all of that and a lot more, but it's far more than I need, and a lot of it is in the paid tier. So I built the small set of features actually use.

https://github.com/kah-ve/DisplayWave

Let me know if you run into any issues. I can only test in my limited hardware so it might not work across every setup.

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u/HugsAllCats 2d ago

So another vibe coded BetterDisplay clone?

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u/Gabcdefga 2d ago

No much more minimal and simple but open source. I don't know what the other apps are since I couldn't find one that didn't put the features I'm looking for behind a pay wall.

At least 2-3 months ago when I started this.

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u/HugsAllCats 2d ago

What a plague... Every person that vibe codes an existing tool this year has eventually said "I don't know what the other apps [do, are, etc]"

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u/Gabcdefga 2d ago

I literally looked for multiple apps my friend. Recommend me another one that has the same feature set. There isn't (or at least wasn't) one.

Also not sure why it's a plague. It's just another option people can use if they like. I have been using for multiple months and it's been the best for me.

It's open source too so people can clone and even update it to fit their use case better since it's open source. (The repo has 15+ clones so far)

It is AI driven development, but that doesn't mean I am not testing and overlooking it. However it is a local Mac app so I don't think I had to give the code too much extra scrutiny as long as it worked well.

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u/nwwy 2d ago

https://github.com/vorssaint/vorssaint-utils can turn on/off, keep awake. I dont need WB. At least not like this without G/M Shift.

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u/Gabcdefga 2d ago

Interesting will take a look. However even if you can pick and choose what you keep it's doing a lot, so still think a simple minimal app has its place.

Like I don't think I'd want to replace rectangle, linear mouse, aldente, all into one mega app. But I'll check it out thanks for sharing.

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u/longjumpingtote 2d ago

I have a question about dimming monitors. On modern monitors, and this may differ from LCD to OLED, how much of the power consumption is from the backlight, and how much is other stuff. So how much power saving happens from dimming?

ChatGPT says going from 100% to 10% brightness saves 50-75% on LCD, and 40-70% on OLED. Someone must've done this comparison.

Does this app treat brightness differently for OLED vs. LCD?

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u/Gabcdefga 2d ago

I don't know the numbers to be honest about power consumption. I'd assume that if DDC is supported to dim the actual monitor, power consumption probably falls quite a bit.

For GPU dimming, it's obviously probably much less. Although even then I think a black screen is still a bit better.

But yeah I don't know