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.bar 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.
No license key, no Pro, no paywall. The whole thing is free. Here's all of it:
Two-finger scroll the icon to set your built-in display, and any external display, over real DDC/CI.
A second icon: scroll to set, click for the menu and a Mute toggle, right-click to quick-mute.
The brightness icon follows whichever display your cursor last visited; the glyph swaps laptop ↔ monitor.
Auto-brightness that keeps the light hitting your eyes steady as the screen changes. More below.
Turn it on and rubarb.bar holds the light reaching your eyes steady across whatever's on screen. A blinding white page dims, dark content brightens, so you stop squinting and stop reaching for the brightness keys.
Scroll the brightness you want by hand. That level becomes the anchor, the comfortable amount of light you've asked for.
As content changes, auto-brightness keeps the emitted light (backlight times how bright the screen actually is) roughly constant relative to your anchor, raising the backlight on dark content and easing it on bright pages.
Adjust by hand any time and that becomes the new anchor on the spot, so auto-brightness never fights a deliberate change. Your scroll always wins.
No learning, no per-app memory, no light sensor reading the room. It is just your anchor and what's on screen, held steady. Off by default; flip it on whenever you like, and everything stays on your Mac.
Pick how the level reads in your menu bar. They all show the level at a glance and all take the same scroll. The brightness and volume icons each carry their own style, so you can mix and match (a pie for brightness, a number for volume, whatever you like).
The classic Pac-Man fill: a single wedge that closes from the top as the level drops.
A disc whose fill opens symmetrically from the top, the look of the pie up at the top of this page.
No disc at all, just the level as a number in a rounded box, for when you want it spelled out.
rubarb.bar is notarized by Apple, so it just opens. No security warnings, no workarounds.
Download & unzip. You'll get rubarb.bar.app. Drag it into your Applications folder.
Double-click to open. The only prompt is the standard one-time "downloaded from the Internet, Open?" confirmation. Click Open.
A pie appears in your menu bar. No Dock icon. Scroll on it to set brightness; click it for the menu. Quit from there.
Install it once and that's the last thing you'll do. rubarb.bar checks for new versions and updates itself silently in the background, with no nag windows, no re-downloading, and no "a new version is available" popups to dismiss. You just keep getting the latest, and you never think about it again.
rubarb.bar 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.
Auto-brightness keeps the emitted light even as your content changes, anchored to the level you set by hand. No learning, no light sensor. Off by default; a manual scroll always wins and re-anchors instantly.
Brilliant! adjusts the built-in display. External-display brightness is manual, over DDC.
Brilliant! reads the screen's brightness on-device, so while it is on macOS shows its purple screen-recording icon and may ask permission. Nothing is recorded, stored, or sent. Turn Brilliant! off and the badge goes away.