rubarb.bar — automatic brightness for your Mac, a scroll away

rubarb.bar FileEdit

09:41

the magic · opt-in auto-brightness

Adaptive Brightness keeps your eyes comfortable.

macOS dims for the room. Adaptive Brightness adjusts for what's actually on your screen: it holds the emitted light, the backlight times how bright the content is, roughly constant. A blinding white page eases down, a dark editor brightens up, all relative to the level you set by hand.

You set the anchor<br>Scroll the brightness you want by hand. That level becomes the anchor: the comfortable amount of light you've asked for, for what's on screen right now.

It holds the light steady<br>As content changes, Adaptive Brightness raises the backlight on dark content and eases it on bright pages, keeping the light that reaches your eyes even, the demo up top, in real time.

A scroll re-anchors it<br>Adjust by hand any time and that becomes the new anchor on the spot. Auto-brightness never fights a deliberate change, your scroll always wins.

It works on your built-in display and your external monitors , and it's per monitor , so you choose which screens it manages. No per-app memory, no cloud round-trips — the screen reading and every adjustment happen on your Mac. Off by default; flip it on whenever you like. (Anonymous usage statistics — never your screen, never your apps, never an identifier — help tune the defaults per monitor model; one click in the menu turns them off. Details.)

or set it yourself

Point. Scroll. Done.

rubarb.bar also lives as a pie in your menu bar that you control by hand. The fill is your current level; the glyph in front says what you're aiming at: a display for brightness, a speaker for volume. Try it, this one's real:

scroll me ↕

Hover the icon<br>Move the cursor up to the pie in your menu bar. No click first; that's the point.

Two-finger scroll<br>Scroll up to brighten, down to dim. The pie fills and your screen tracks it instantly.

Let go<br>The level holds. Click the pie any time for the menu, mute, icon styles, and Adaptive Brightness.

100%

75%

50%

25%

muted

everything, free

One app. Every feature. No tiers.

No license key, no Pro, no paywall. The whole thing is free. Here's all of it:

Adaptive Brightness opt-inContent-aware auto-brightness that holds your light steady, on the built-in and external monitors, per monitor, even when an external is your main display or your screens are mirrored.

Scroll-to-set brightness Two-finger scroll the icon to set your built-in display and any external display, over real DDC/CI.

Master volume A second icon: scroll to set the output level, right-click to quick-mute, scroll up to unmute.

Smart display routing The brightness icon follows whichever display your cursor last visited, or add a dedicated icon per external monitor.

F1/F2 for external monitors opt-inLet the keyboard brightness keys dim and brighten the external display your pointer's on, over DDC, which macOS won't do. The built-in keeps working as usual.

Three icon styles Pie, Curtain, or Percent, set per icon. The Percent readout even counts as Adaptive Brightness adjusts.

Silent auto-update It keeps itself current in the background, no nag windows, no re-downloading. Install once, forget it.

make it yours

Three icon styles.

Pick how the level reads in your menu bar. They all show it at a glance and all take the same scroll. The brightness and volume icons each carry their own style, so you can mix and match, a pie for brightness, a number for volume, whatever you like.

Pie<br>The classic Pac-Man fill: a single wedge that closes from the top as the level drops.

Curtain<br>A disc whose fill opens symmetrically from the top, the look of the pie up at the top of this page. The default.

Percent<br>No disc at all, just the level as a number in a rounded box, for when you want it spelled out.

first launch

Installing takes 20 seconds

rubarb.bar is notarized by Apple, so it just opens. No security warnings, no workarounds.

Download & unzip. You'll get rubarb.bar.app. Drag it into your Applications folder.

Double-click to open. The only prompt is the standard one-time "downloaded from the Internet, Open?" confirmation. Click Open .

A pie appears in your menu bar . No Dock icon. Scroll it to set brightness; click it for the menu and to turn on Adaptive Brightness. Quit from there.

the honest part

Fair warnings

rubarb.bar does a couple of slightly magical things, and the tricks have consequences. No surprises:

Apple Silicon only It drives the built-in panel through a private Apple framework, the only thing that reliably works on M-series Macs. No Intel.

Not on the App Store That same private API means it can't ship through the store, and a future macOS could change it. It's a focused utility, not a platform.

External brightness needs DDC External monitors are driven over DDC/CI, which most displays support but some docks, KVMs, and the base-model HDMI port don't. Adaptive Brightness manages a monitor once...