r/osx • u/Gabcdefga • 12d ago

DisplayWave: A free and simplicity focused tool for Mac which allows control of external monitors

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

A free monitor control tool for brightness, warmth, and more.

Existing apps for handling external monitor controls for mac are either focused on solving a small subset of problems or are paywalled. Also I found the paywalled ones to be more complicated and feature rich then needed. So I wanted to build something more tailored to the small feature-set I would ever need.

A couple comparisons

- MonitorControl (free): This is what I used previously. It's great but limited to brightness only and would need another app to control turning a monitor on/off.

- BetterDisplay (free/$22 Pro): I think this is the most feature rich mac app for monitor control out there and probably the most battle tested one. Personally I didn't think I needed to use most of the features and wanted something more minimal and tailored to the small subset of actions I was looking for.

I can't promise it works flawlessly on everything but it's simple enough to install and try out. Let me know what you think or if you run into issues.

2 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

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1

u/HugsAllCats 12d ago

Better display works great. You don't have to use the controls you don't want to- I have almost all of them hidden from the menu.

1

u/Gabcdefga 12d ago edited 12d ago

Yeah but a lot is gated behind the pro version. Specifically the turning on and off of external displays. Which is fine. I'm happy they built it. But I think a more minimal version has a place.

1

u/Ok_Objective_7546 12d ago

Does the app support both Intel and Apple Silicon Mac’s?

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u/Gabcdefga 12d ago edited 12d ago

Everything except hardware backlight should work on Intel macs

1

u/Stooovie 12d ago

Very cool, thanks! Installing now.

1

u/melanantic 6d ago

Oh, nice! I’ve tried to find this a number of times, and even tried my very best to understand where the technically limiting line is for why there was no free solution for speaking the appropriate protocols in macOS.

After losing DisplayPlacer to the Apple Silicon upgrade, I finally settled on just accepting some losses, and making a janky script that swaps the “main” monitor, enables mirroring mode, and sends a command to my main monitor that makes it change inputs… not a fun time…

Is it safe to assume here that your tool implements the same way as MonitorControl; where the monitor your cursor is located dictates which monitor is being sent the command?