Priyanshu Yadav

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Open source

Brightness Tray

Windows gives you a brightness slider for the laptop screen and nothing for the monitor next to it. Brightness Tray gives every attached display its own slider and picks the right method for each: WMI for the laptop panel, DDC/CI for external monitors, and a dimming overlay for screens that support neither.

Role
Author and maintainer
Year
2026
Built with
Rust, Win32 (windows crate), DDC/CI, WMI, GitHub Actions

Source on GitHubDownload BrightnessTray.exe

5GitHub stars
39release downloads
346 KBsingle exe, no runtime
75 minfrom a user’s bug report to a fixed release
Brightness Tray flyout with three sliders: built-in display at 70, a Dell monitor at 45, and an LG TV using software dimming at 85.
One slider per display. The TV has no hardware control, so it gets a dimming overlay.

How it is built

  • About 2,000 lines of Rust calling Win32 directly, with no GUI framework.
  • The flyout and its sun icon are drawn by a 108-line signed-distance-field rasteriser.
  • A worker thread only sends the newest slider value to slow DDC/CI monitors, so dragging stays smooth.
  • When idle it releases its handles, trims its working set and drops into Windows’ efficiency mode.

One user, two releases

The first GitHub issue came from someone already using it every day. He asked for keyboard shortcuts, which shipped about 12 hours later. He then found a bug in them, and the fix was released 75 minutes after his report.

Settings panel for global keyboard shortcuts.
Global shortcuts, added in v1.1 at a user’s request.
Architecture diagram showing the UI thread, worker thread and the three brightness backends.
Architecture, from the README.