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Lunar
p/lunarIntelligent adaptive brightness for your external display
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Alin Panaitiu

Lunar 5 - Control every aspect of your external monitors

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If you got a new monitor for your Mac, you noticed there's no way to control its brightness from the Mac.

Lunar brings back brightness control for monitors, along with volume, contrast, input switching and can even turn off monitors or the built-in display.

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Alin Panaitiu
Maker
Hi everyone! I'm Alin, the creator of 🌕 Lunar, an app for controlling every aspect of your 🖥 external monitors. 1 year ago I quit my well paid job and began investing my time into making a living off Lunar. I'm now making half of the salary from that 💸 "well-paid job" solely from Lunar sales. That has allowed me to work on Lunar full time, while also creating other Mac apps on https://lowtechguys.com/ I'm giving 75% OFF ‼️ the Pro license to 20 ProductHunt users. Use the following coupon code at checkout: PH75OFFLUNAR5 --------- I've been posting about major versions of Lunar on ProductHunt since v1, but this one is special. I finally feel that Lunar has reached a very stable base, compatible with all monitors in existence* and able to control things that you didn't even know was possible. Adaptive Brightness for external monitors is Lunar's greatest feat, but there are a few new features you might find useful: • ⏻ BlackOut:   - 💻️ Turn off MacBook display without closing the lid (automatically when a monitor is connected)   - 🖥️ Turn off external monitors while still keeping their charging/USB functions so you can focus on one screen at a time • 🎬️ App Presets: set brightness to a specific value based on what app is visible • ⏱️ Schedule brightness to change on specific time of day • 🔆 Brightness Dimming for Sidecar, AirPlay, TVs and DisplayLink screens • 🎨 Color Calibration controls (if the monitor supports them) • 🔌 Switch to other HDMI, DisplayPort or Thunderbolt ports using keyboard shortcuts (you can forget about KVM devices) • ＄Command-line scripting: https://lunar.fyi/#cli • 🏮Use any Ambient Light Sensor for adapting brightness: https://lunar.fyi/#sensor * some monitors might appear incompatible because they are non-compliant with the DDC standard or because of Mac hardware limitations, this is not a problem with Lunar and can't be fixed in software
Harshit Choudhary
Hey, I am using Windows right now but I'm considering to buy new Mac Mini (Studio?) so, will Lunar be helpful? Edit: I do have an LG Monitor but its not a UHD one.
Alin Panaitiu
Maker
@choudhary Lunar is especially useful on Mac Mini since your only choice for a screen there is an external monitor which doesn't support brightness control from the Mac. The only (modern) monitors that support native Mac brightness control are the LG Ultrafine 5K and the Pro Display XDR which are prohibitively expensive. For everything else, there's Lunar :) If you also get a monitor with speakers or jack output, you can use Lunar to also control its volume. And if you want to keep using your Windows PC with the same monitor, you can use Lunar to switch inputs with a keyboard shortcut. If you want automatic brightness for the Mac Mini, there's also the possibility of using a wireless ambient light sensor: https://lunar.fyi/sensor (although you have to do it yourself ^_^)
Harshit Choudhary
@alin23 sounds amazing! (hope the promo doesn't run out until I get my hands on the new Mac Mini/Studio :P)
Alin Panaitiu
Maker
@choudhary If you get the Mac Mini after the coupon expires, let me know and I'll make an exception ^_^
Kim Salmi
Very nice "side hustle"! Congrats on the launch 🎉
Alin Panaitiu
Maker
@infr Thank you Kim! ✨
Derek Nuzum
This is really cool! As someone that is intimately familiar with the nuances and difficulties managing displays and preferences, this is quite simply inventive and contains loads of functionality missing from any OS. Thanks for the linking to Plugable (disclaimer: I work for them)! The DisplayLink stuff is tricky and beyond neat!
Alin Panaitiu
Maker
@dnuzum Oh wow, nice to meet you! I always recommend Plugable to Lunar users that only have DisplayLink as an alternative. I like its simplicity :)
Basharath
Looks great. Congrats on the launch!
Alin Panaitiu
Maker
@basharath Thank you Basharath! Good luck with Tweetlet! I love these small utilities for generating pretty content (like carbon.now.sh for code, or Apollo for Reddit)
Basharath
@alin23 Thanks for noticing Tweetlet. I'm adding few other features to make it a very useful tool for generating social media content.
charith_a
Wow, looks great. Congrats!
Alin Panaitiu
Maker
@charith_a Thanks! As a fellow plumber of bits and bytes, I'm looking forward to see what you'll build 😊
DP
It was NEEDED! Thanks
csol
Only found a couple of apps that could do these things, but all of them were clunky and never suited my needs. Decided to take the leap of faith and buy it with the code to support the developer. Even if the Pro doesn't add much additional value for me, the Free features deserve already some love! Great initiative! :)
Ovidiu Rusu
I love your work! Great job with the app and the constant updates!
Berkay Barlas
I'm one of the first users of Lunar. Even though I was very happy to see the improvements, it became very laggy and slow for me for a display brightness application. Sadly, I started to use other simple alternatives.
Alin Panaitiu
Maker
@berkay_barlas Hi Berkay! Have you tried this version? Is this still the case? Lunar 4 was a bit hurried because I wanted to get DDC on M1 in people's hands fast, so there were a lot of memory leaks and CPU usage would spike randomly. Lunar 5 is a lot leaner, RAM usage hovers around 30MB when the UI is not visible and CPU usage is 0.1% even in Sync Mode (when there's no brightness change) Of course, if you don't need the additional features of Lunar, alternatives can be a better choice for you. I've also created a comparison table with alternatives here in case it might be useful: https://lunar.fyi/#comparison
Pedro Wunderlich
Useful little app for those of us that have external monitors. Appreciate the 75% off! Very happy customer!
Alin Panaitiu
Maker
@pddro Thanks Pedro! Glad you find it useful!
Tanya Gupta
Congratulations on the launch!! We are launching on Thursday too, would love to connect and discuss all the strategies and your journey.
Trey Cannon
Not working for me. I use a Sanyo tv as external screen and I'm not seeing anything happen.
Alin Panaitiu
Maker
@trey_cannon TVs don’t support hardware brightness control. You can enable Software Dimming using the red button under the monitor name to get some brightness control. Here's a how you can enable Software Dimming: https://cln.sh/A0XNYk
Jason Yang
This is awesome. I'm definitely going to be giving this a try! Thank you Alin for making!