rubarb.bar is content-aware auto-brightness that stops white pages from blasting you in dark mode
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
Collected discussion
this is something I need. Even with dark reader, i get a few flashbangs
flashbangs! haha that's great, hope this helps
I already have it installed ! Great app.Could you add a few more themes for the menu bar icons?
yah tell me what you want!
How about a volume icon like this? Or a coffee cup/glass of water that fills up as you increase brightness? Or a Fire icon that goes up with brightness Or a clock icon for volume?
This looks amazing, but how does it work? How does it detect the brightness of the content on the screen?
have to give it permission to see screen but the app is only measuring luminance, not looking at any actual content
This is great! Every time I switched to Filemaker I got "blinded by the light." I just wish it was a little faster at dimming.
Thanks! will continue to improve performance
great idea. solves a real problem. and it does it with charme. nice!
thank you so much!
Content-aware brightness is a smart angle -- standard adaptive brightness does ambient light sensing, which doesn't account for what's actually on the screen. A dark IDE next to white documentation at the same ambient light level should not be the same brightness, but every OS-level solution treats them identically. A few questions since you're iterating: does it analyze per-window or per-page/tab? And how does it handle split-screen where you have a light and dark surface simultaneously -- does it average, pick the frontmost, or something else? The 'stops white pages from blasting you in dark mode' framing is exactly right. Adding this to the trial list.
yeah dude! still tuning but I can tell you it's tricky to solve and worth it.
Would you kindly but on homebrew. It is much more convenient for me and a lot of users I guess...
brew tap ericrall/rubarb && brew install rubarb
Does this also enable increased brightness overall like the Vivid and Brightintosh (and I'm sure a couple more) apps?
Yep both full max brightness and increased headroom on adaptive
Thanks for that answer, and for making a tool that is both useful and offers a unique spin on an everyday problem. Good job.
Have been struggling with an issue for several years: reading pdfs when system is in dark theme is very difficult; except the pdf, everything else is dark. Your app solves this problem. Thanks for the fantastic app. Works like a chime.
fuck yes! thanks. now I need to figure out how to spread the word
Does this reduce battery usage as well or does whatever process that’s running use more battery than what’s made up for when reducing brightness with brighter items on screen?
I don't have data to answer the question yet but my objective has been performance first over battery savings so I suspect it uses more battery than it saves. good question!
Hi, thank you for answering! I just downloaded it and it works well. However, it does not function on my external monitor. I’m guessing this is in part because my monitor doesn't have native brightness controls. I get around this by using betterdisplay for dimming the screen. I think it would be cool if you could implement betterdisplay integration! Thank you for the app. Edit: updated to the latest version (2.43) and the issue was solved! Just need to set the external monitor's brightness through rubarb by scrolling on the menu icon to initialize the adaptive brightness
Love free apps like this, will give it a try and report back
This is awesome, finally a solution for that! Great work!