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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

I have to say - if your monitor is blinding you, you have it set to too high a brightness. You're doing yourself a disservice by not turning it down. It should only throw out as much light as a piece of pristine printer paper in the same orientation.

In the middle of the day my monitor tops out at about 30 of 100, and in the evenings I will occasionally turn it down to about 5 or 10. Many modern monitors will offer an option to save multiple settings, or they at least make brightness a top level configuration setting.

EDIT: Is saying "If your monitor is hurting your eyes, turn it down," really such a controversial statement?

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I like having my display as bright as possible without it being uncomfortable; it helps with readability. On my laptop and phone I'll shift the brightness throughout the day to meet this heuristic, but alas, Windows does not make this trivial with an external monitor. Usually you have to fiddle with the monitor's physical buttons and navigate down into a menu. So I just don't bother.

https://twinkletray.com/

Most desktop monitors have their brightness & other config exposed via the DDC (DDC?) protocol. This is a simple UI that exposes the brightness controls on Windows. Much easier than using the buttons.

You might need to go to the monitor's menu and enable DDC if it's disabled by default.

On Linux this script works for me:

sudo modprobe i2c-dev; sudo ddcutil setvcp 10 $1 &

Thanks! I've been looking for this!

On macOS I've been using https://github.com/the0neyouseek/MonitorControl -- which also lets you use the brightness keys to control external monitors.

My monitor has terrible "buttons". This utility means I no longer have to fumble around with them to adjust the brightens. Thanks for the link!

I can't believe I'm only just now finding out about this. Do you have any idea why this isn't something built into Windows?

Windows has a brightness slider in the side bar, but it doesn't seem to work with external monitors. Probably because OS-level brightness controls were implemented when laptops became popular, and traditional PCs with external monitors became an afterthought.

That's fine, enjoy your preferences all you want.

Just realize when you use them as a justification for changing defaults which work fine for most everyone else, you're going to annoy people. Especially when your preferences tend to fly in the face of common sense.

But if you're getting eyestrain, it's by definition uncomfortable, and worth the 10 seconds or so to navigate the said menus.

Not everything has a dark mode available, so make sure that the worst case is tolerable.

Alas, these days webpages at half-brightness are often unreadable because of washed-out main text.

In my experience, low contrast text is going to have a low contrast no matter how bright or dim your computer screen is. That is, turning up the brightness will only wash out the text as it overwhelms your eyes.

It’s also an accessibility issue, but that’s a comment for a different article.

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