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 normalizes the light reaching your eyes across whatever's on screen. A blinding white page dims, dark content brightens, so you stop squinting and stop reaching for the brightness keys.
Your manual scrolls still set the overall level. Auto-brightness only nudges around it, and it never runs away.
It reacts to what you're actually looking at, learning per content (not per app), so it gets the feel right whatever you open.
The ambient environment raises or lowers the baseline, so the same page reads right in a dim room or a bright one.
Off by default; flip it on whenever you like. Manual scrolling always wins, instantly, and it only ever nudges around the level you set. Everything stays on your Mac.
Pick how the fill reads in your menu bar. Both show the level at a glance, both take the same scroll.
The classic Pac-Man fill: a 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.
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.
The auto-brightness loop is off by default and still being refined. Manual scrolling always wins and is rock-solid.
Strawberry Rubarb adjusts the built-in display. External-display brightness is manual, over DDC.