Free, open-source display control for macOS (Apple Silicon). Control your external monitor's real hardware — brightness, contrast, volume, colour, input — over DDC/CI, from the menu bar, your keyboard, the CLI, or Shortcuts. An open alternative to BetterDisplay, Lunar, or MonitorControl.
Install (30 seconds)
- Download
OpenDisplay.zipbelow and unzip. - Drag OpenDisplay.app to Applications and open it — signed & notarized, no Gatekeeper warnings.
- Click the display glyph in the menu bar.
New in 0.4.0 — Adaptive Display
Bring macOS-grade brightness and warmth intelligence to your external monitor, driving its real hardware over DDC. Opt-in under Settings → Adaptive display (Labs).
🔆 Adaptive brightness — best available intelligence, automatically
- Built-in display on → your monitor mirrors the built-in panel's ambient-light-driven brightness.
- Built-in off but lid open (Mac-keyboard-plus-external desk setups) → OpenDisplay reads the ambient light sensor directly and dims the monitor to the room — real light response with no panel to mirror.
- Lid closed → a configurable day/night schedule curve.
- Your manual tweaks teach a lasting offset; adaptive pauses for a minute after you touch a slider and never fights you.
🌙 Evening warmth
Shifts the monitor's hardware colour preset warmer in the evening and back each morning — following macOS Night Shift's own state when readable, otherwise a schedule. Your daytime preset is remembered and restored on quit, in the morning, and even across a crash mid-evening.
🛠 Also fixed
- The keyboard brightness keys now keep working across app updates — local builds are stably signed, so the Accessibility permission they need no longer resets on a rebuild.
271 unit tests; verified live on a Samsung ultrawide end to end.
Requirements: Apple Silicon Mac, macOS 14+. Full details in the CHANGELOG.