u/ericbigguy24

My eyes love dark mode brighter and white docs dimmer. Yours will too! Free forever if you license in the next two weeks. rubarb.bar

Hi all, rubarb.bar reduces screen brightness for white screens like loading web pages and increases brightness on dark screen content so the average luminance hitting your eyes is evened out. I built if for myself and use it all day every day. It’s free and I hope it helps you too. I wouldn’t live without it anymore.

Since launching rubarb.bar yesterday was so fun, here's another I made: Phil is a free Mac menu-bar app that automatically keeps your windows maximized so you never have to. It's for the person who is, let's say, particular about their workspace. The one who opens a new window and immediately reaches for the corner to drag it full. Who notices when something lands 40 pixels short of the edge. Who just wants every window to use the whole screen without thinking about it.

The difference from Rectangle or Magnet: those require you to trigger the snap. Phil just runs in the background and handles it. Open a window, Phil fills it. It also knows when you've intentionally snapped something to half or quarter screen and leaves it alone — the detection is geometric so it doesn't matter if you used a keyboard shortcut, a drag, or the Sequoia tiling menu.

Terminal is a good example of where it earns its keep. Terminal resizes in character cells so pixel-exact fill overshoots the screen edge. Phil shrinks the request down to the largest window that fits cleanly, remembers that size, and applies it directly for new windows — no wobble, no fighting. There's a small gap in the bottom-right corner because Terminal's grid doesn't divide evenly into your display, which is also why macOS's own zoom button never fills Terminal. Phil just gets it as close as physics allows and stops. Some apps are excluded by default — Messages, Calculator, System Settings, that kind of thing. You can add or remove anything from the menu. Free: https://rall.digital/phil — happy to answer anything.

I made a free Mac menu bar app, rubarb.bar, that takes a different angle on brightness from the usual utilities.

If you live in dark mode, you know the feeling: everything's dim and easy on the eyes, then one rogue app or a white webpage opens and blasts you. Normal auto brightness can't help, it only reacts to the room, not to what's on your screen.

rubarb.bar is content-aware. It holds the actual light reaching your eyes steady as on screen content changes, so switching between a bright white page and a dim dark mode editor stops being jarring. It's all relative to a level you set by hand, so it never fights you.

How it differs from Lunar, the usual pick: Lunar follows the room or a schedule (ambient sensor, sync, sunrise/sunset); rubarb.bar follows your screen. It also lets you two-finger-scroll the menu-bar icon to set brightness or volume, controls external displays over DDC, and has Pie/Curtain/Percent icon styles.

Free, no tiers, no paywall: https://rubarb.bar

I'm the dev, happy to answer anything: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erall