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Comment by roland35 | Hacker News Reader

My favorite Mac shortcut is now option-command B, which I connected to an automator app which changes my external monitor brightness. It calls ddcctl which is a command line script which communicates over the displayport connection to control the monitor. This is a huge improvement over the annoying on screen monitor menu!

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I use an USB light sensor to automatically adjust the display brightness with ddcctl.

http://www.yoctopuce.com/EN/products/usb-environmental-senso...

Thank you for that! The built in Mac display brightness controls only seem to work for the Apple Cinema Displays - they do nothing on my Asus monitor.

I just tried ddcctl ( https://github.com/kfix/ddcctl ) - and it worked perfectly over HDMI through a HDMI switch. I didn't even know what to look for - so this comment was a lot of help.

Try Lunar https://lunar.fyi/

Love it!

This sounds like something I'd find very useful, do you mind sharing a link on how to set this up or where I can find more information on this? Thanks!

MonitorControl achieves the same thing but using the existing keyboard keys: https://github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl (recent discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23785291)

I did this before learning about other tools! But you can download ddcctl from GitHub, then create an automator "quick action" with no input from any application. Then I created a flow of "Ask for text" (brightness), "run shell script" (/path/ddcctl -d 1 -b "$1/"

Once you have that saved you can go to your Mac keyboard settings and add this new automator app as a new shortcut!

Or, use an existing app :)

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