Work with a desktop screen It’s one of the trends that has triumphed the most over the pandemic thanks to the rush of teleworkers it has caused. Apple’s best solution for this is an iMac that integrates the computer with this display, but many have opted to connect a third-party external display to their MacBook or Mac mini. The latter is precisely what I do, with an external LG monitor.
But working with an external monitor from another brand has its drawbacks: you lose direct keyboard commands to adjust its brightness and you have to do it using the controls and menus of the monitor itself (usually something longer and more tedious). However, there are solutions to alleviate this discomfort
You don’t need an XDR Pro display to control brightness with the keyboard
Thanks to some system components, we can install small utilities in macOS to be able to regulate the brightness. An example is MonitorControl Liteavailable for free in the Mac App Store, with which we can adjust this brightness from the system’s own menu bar:
In the preferences of the application, we can even define keyboard shortcuts to be able to modify this artificial luminosity:
What this app does is very simple: it takes the brightness we set using the buttons on the screen as the maximum brightness and applies a black layer over it. If we lower the brightness of the screen, this black layer becomes less transparent and the effect is that the brightness decreases further.
Therefore, the ideal is that we set the brightness of the monitor to the maximum and from that moment we control it through MonitorControl Lite. Or, if the brightness of the monitor seems excessive to us, we can set new lows
MonitorControl Lite works with all external monitors (the one I use is an LG 27UL500-W, in case you were curious), but it requires macOS Catalina to work. For more compatibility, we have alternatives like Brightness Slider or Brightness Control which work almost the same way.
Imagen | Dhru J
