Scroll the menu-bar icon to set your Mac's brightness.
No click, no Control Center, no reaching for F1. Two-finger scroll right on the icon — a little pie fills to show the level, and your screen responds in real time.
Rubarb lives as a pie in your menu bar. The fill is your current brightness; the glyph in front tells you what you're aiming at — a display for brightness, a speaker for volume.
Move the cursor up to the pie in your menu bar. No click first — that's the point.
Scroll up to brighten, down to dim. The pie fills and your screen tracks it instantly.
That's it. The level holds. Click the pie any time for the menu, mute, and settings.
Unlock in-app via Redeem License… in the menu. Purchasing isn't live yet — the download below is the full free app.
Rubarb is signed but not yet notarized by Apple, so the first open needs one extra confirmation. After that it just runs.
Download & unzip. You'll get Rubarb.app. Drag it into your Applications folder.
Right-click the app → Open. macOS asks if you're sure — click Open. (Double-clicking the first time will refuse; right-click → Open is the trick.)
On newer macOS you may instead see the prompt under System Settings → Privacy & Security — scroll down and hit Open Anyway.
A pie appears in your menu bar. No Dock icon. Scroll on it to set brightness; click it for the menu. Quit from there.
Prefer the terminal? Strip the quarantine flag and just open it:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Rubarb.app && open /Applications/Rubarb.app
SHA-256 33c08190e0f85eee81f019e4d76815db78e4abd4c9cb561a332873f698f71758
Rubarb does one slightly magical thing, and the trick has consequences. No surprises:
It drives the built-in panel through a private Apple framework — the only thing that reliably works on M-series Macs. No Intel.
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.
The learning brightness loop is opt-in and still being dogfooded. Manual scrolling always wins and is rock-solid.
Per-app memory and auto-adjust apply to the built-in display. External brightness is manual over DDC.