Lower Minimum Display Brightness on macOS

displaymacos

When working late, I'd like to lower the screen brightness further than the OS X allows in using the brightness keys.

While you can use ⌥+⇧+F1/F21 to change the brightness in smaller quaterish increments, this does not have an effect between 0 and 1 bars.

i.e. The values 0.25, 0.50, 0.75, 1.00 have the same brightness. The brightness only incrementally increases for quaters above 1.

In Ubuntu I've accomplished very low brightness settings by manually changing integers in the configuration files. Is there something similar that I could do in OS X?

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1 – This works for the volume the same way.

Best Answer

Another application for decreasing brightness is Shady. But like Shades, it just draws an overlay over the screen and doesn't actually turn down the backlight.

LCDs require a similar amount of energy to display bright and dark pixels, and some LCDs actually require slightly more energy to display dark pixels, so Shady and Shades might even increase energy use.

There is a small Objective-C utility (https://github.com/nriley/brightness/) for changing the brightness of displays, but it cannot set the brightess below the normal minimum value either.

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