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Shine

Control the brightness and volume of external monitors from your Mac — with your keyboard's own brightness and volume keys, over DDC/CI.

Swift SwiftUI macOS DDC/CI
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Shine app icon

Overview

Native keys,
any monitor

Third-party monitors ignore the brightness and volume keys on a Mac keyboard. Shine fixes that. It lives in your menu bar and speaks the DDC/CI protocol to external displays, so your keyboard's own keys adjust the monitor under your pointer — with a macOS-style on-screen HUD, just like the built-in display.

  • Brightness control for external monitors via DDC/CI
  • Volume & mute control for monitor speakers
  • Native keyboard keys — brightness follows the mouse pointer, volume follows the audio output
  • Multi-monitor aware — displays matched to DDC ports by EDID
  • macOS-style on-screen HUD when using the keys
  • Lives in the menu bar; the icon can be hidden entirely
Shine

How It Works

Talking to displays
the hard way

Shine communicates over the DDC/CI protocol (VESA MCCS): brightness is VCP code 0x10, speaker volume 0x62, and mute 0x8D. On Apple Silicon the I2C channel is reached through the private IOAVService API, resolved at runtime. Media keys are intercepted with a CGEventTap, which is why the app needs Accessibility permission.

  • Apple Silicon, macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later
  • Works over HDMI, DisplayPort & USB-C
  • Runtime-resolved IOAVService I2C access
  • Free & open source, MIT licensed

Tech Stack

Technologies Used

Swift SwiftUI AppKit DDC/CI (VESA MCCS) IOKit / IOAVService CoreGraphics (CGEventTap) CoreAudio Menu-Bar App