App: Dimmer
Developer: Andreas Sturmayr
Genres: Utilities, Productivity

The no-nonsense screen dimmer for Mac. Download. Launch. Your screens are dimmed.

Dimmer is a pretty good screen dimmer I wrote for myself and use every day. If you are looking for a straightforward, elegant screen dimmer with intuitive multi-monitor support, you won’t find a better one. Here are some facts about it:

•  Multiple displays, dimmed separately or in groups
•  Invisible background service (not even a status item, if you don’t need sliders)
•  Fast, reproducible adjustment in user-defined steps
•  Fade-out numeric feedback overlay (like the system brightness control)
•  Customizable sliders (length, orientation, behavior)
•  Super-intuitive: move pointer onto screen, press global hot key
•  Works with all system features (Night Shift, Spaces, full-screen mode)
•  Scales from no dimming to totally black (no residual image)
•  Respects color profiles exactly (no tinge or hue)
•  Phone & email support
•  Tested on Mavericks 10.9 and High Sierra 10.13
•  Clean: no performance hit, no ads, no tracking (compare competitor’s app sizes)

Dimmer reduces the display brightness by scaling the video signal. This point is important. Rather than putting a semi-transparent (computationally expensive) mask over your entire display, Dimmer intervenes at the last possible stage in the graphics pipeline by adapting a video operation that is performed anyway. As a result, there is zero overhead; dimming does not consume any memory, CPU time, or graphics resources.

Quoting from a customer review: “Dimmer is, by far, the best screen dimmer, maybe even the only one written correctly, by controlling the intensity of the video signal.”

Photographers will appreciate that Dimmer scrupulously respects each display’s color profile. It does not introduce a tinge or hue.

Dimmer is totally self-contained, no installation required. After downloading, you just launch the app. It will apply dimming and show a small settings window, see the attached screenshots. Use this window to tailor Dimmer to your tastes. Don’t be fooled by its simplicity, a lot of thought and effort went into achieving it.

You can dim the built-in display and as many external displays as you like; each gets its own slider in its respective menu bar. A pair of global hot keys change the brightness of the display which contains the mouse pointer. So to adjust the brightness of a display, use its slider, or simply move the pointer onto that display and press the global hot keys, no mouse click required. Both the sliders and the hot keys are compatible with full-screen mode, you always stay in whatever app you are using.

You can also allow Dimmer to continue dimming in the background after you quit the app. This gets the app out of the way, while dimming stays active and responsive to both hot key and slider input.

One caveat: Dimmer is incompatible with f.lux. I suggest (and personally use) macOS’s built-in Night Shift feature instead.

For a detailed description of Dimmer and all of its features, please have a look at Dimmer’s Help page on the support website.

Release notes:
Version 2.2 implements the most frequent feature request:

          •  The global hot keys are now user-defined.

It also adds direct access to Dimmer’s preferences from the status item.

If you have purchased Dimmer and encounter problems, don’t leave an angry review, do the smart thing and get in touch! My phone number and email address are listed in Dimmer’s Help menu.

If you like Dimmer, please consider leaving five-star a review. One word is enough! This is the single most important thing you can do to support Dimmer and have your feature requests implemented.