waydabber / BetterDisplay
- суббота, 3 декабря 2022 г. в 00:40:21
Unlock your displays on your Mac! Smooth scaling, HiDPI unlock, XDR/HDR extra brightness upscale, DDC, brightness and dimming, dummy displays, PIP and lots more!
Custom Resolutions, XDR/HDR Extra Brightness, Brightness Adjustment, Dummy Displays, Picture in Picture, Display Overrides - a macOS menubar app.
BetterDisplay is a truly wonderful tool! It let's you convert your displays to fully scalable screens, manage display configuration overrides, allows brightness and color control, provides XDR/HDR brightness upscaling (extra brightness beyond 100% for compatible displays with Apple Silicon Macs), full dimming to black, helps you create and manage virtual displays (dummies) for your Mac, create Picture in Picture windows of your displays and gives you a host of other features to manage your display's settings easily from the menu bar.
System Preferences
»Accessibility
»Zoom
) or High Quality screenshots even on 1080p displays... and more is coming! :)
Note: featues marked with an asterisk (*) require a Pro license. Some features may be available in the latest pre-release version only.
BetterDisplay | MonitorControl | Lunar | SwitchResX | Vivid | DisplayBuddy | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Custom scaled resolution editing | ||||||
Native smooth scaling | ||||||
Night Shift for TVs | ||||||
Display name override | ||||||
Native, default resolution editing | ||||||
Dummy display creation | ||||||
Dummy-display association | ||||||
Display mode selector menu | ||||||
Resolution slider | ||||||
Picture in Picture | ||||||
Custom dummies | ||||||
Full screen streaming | ||||||
Stream/PIP, stretching, off-centering | ||||||
Stream/PIP rotation, portrait Sidecar | ||||||
Teleprompter mode (stream flipping) | ||||||
Mirror configuration | ||||||
DDC brightness control | ||||||
DDC volume control | ||||||
DDC input switching | ||||||
DDC input customization | ||||||
Native brightnesss and volume keys | ||||||
Basic custom keyboard shortcuts | ||||||
Advanced custom keyboard shortcuts | ||||||
Basic native OSD support | ||||||
Combined native OSD support | ||||||
Software dimming (color table) | ||||||
Software dimming (overlay) | ||||||
Combined dimming | ||||||
Dimming to black | ||||||
Color adjustments | ||||||
Color temperature control | ||||||
XDR extra brightness | ||||||
Third party HDR extra brightness | ||||||
Display config protection | ||||||
EDID retrieval | ||||||
Custom timings on Intel | ||||||
Command Line Integration | ||||||
DIY hardware integration | ||||||
Advanced Brightness syncing | ||||||
Presets | ||||||
Schedule based settings | ||||||
App specific settings | ||||||
Price | $15 | $0 | $23 | $15 | €20 | $13 |
Trial days | 14 | - | 14 | 10 | - | - |
Please note that this comparison is only meant to give you a big picture, does not contain all secondary and derived functionalities (free or paid) for each software and might not be a fair representation in every respect as I am not an expert on the alternative apps. I am pretty sure the devs of respective alternatives would feel the comparison is skewed in some way or I did miss an important aspect or unique advantage of the competing solution. For an educated decision you might want to try all apps that offer some sort of trial. If you feel the comparison is not fair, drop me a note a the BetterDisplay Discord channel!
Here are some instructions on how to activate the most seeked-after features of the app.
With BetterDisplay you can fully unlock the maximum brightness of your Apple XDR display as well as your third party HDR capable display.
You don't have to do anything special to enable the display - once you start the app, you can simply use the brightness slider to increase the brightness level beyond 100% to produce up to 1600 nits on your Pro Display XDR. For other HDR displays, the app automatically sets up the maximum brightness upscaling level taking into account the reported maximum panel brightness.
Please note that the XDR/HDR upscaling feature requires an Apple Silicon Mac!
Some other steps that might be neccessary:
Settings
(the gear icon at the bottom of the menu) / Keyboard
/ Set up Accessibility Permissions
Enable HDR Mode
. This is not required for XDR displays (these automatically switch to EDR/HDR mode).Some Macs have issues with custom resolutions. Apple Silicon Macs notoriously don't allow sub-4K resolution displays to have HiDPI ("Retina") resolutions even though some 1440p display would greatly benefit from having a HiDPI "Retina" mode. On other Macs the resolution options for wide displays are too constrained.
BetterDisplay solves the problem by unlocking your screens making them fully scalable natively while providing a nice HiDPI resolution slider to freely scale the desktop size. Also available is the option to create a flexible virtual "dummy" displays that support an unprecedented range of Retina resolutions. You can then utilize this dummy display as a mirror source for your display achieving any HiDPI resolution or for other purposes.
To enable the native smooth scaling feature:
Settings
(the gear icon at the bottom of the menu).Displays
section,Edit the default system configuration of this display
feature under the display you want to make scalable,Set up native smooth resolution scaling
option just below it as it appears.Show advanced settings for native smooth scaling
and enable Add a near-native HiDPI variant for the native resolution
as well.Apply Changes
button at the bottom of the screen.Settings
> Displays
tab and make the setting for each of your displays! :)Native panel pixel resolution
. If this is not correctly shown for your display under Settings
> Displays
, please select the Edit native panel pixel resolution
option and enter the correct values!Default resolution
(on normally LoDPI display this tends to be the native resoltuion - which will mean the slider maxes out at 100%, on HiDPI display half of the native resolution - which will make the resolution slider max out at 200%). If you want to rescale the resolution slider, change the Default resolution
to an accessible different resolution than it is set.Native panel pixel resolution
which is available only as normal resolution (not HiDPI). Converting the native resolution to HIDPI would not make sense (except for some special use cases like screenshot and accessibility zooming quality improvement) - for this or to achieve a higher-than-native-resolution scaling (for extra screen real estate) you can continue to use dummy mirroring.An alternative (for some scenarios the only valid) approach is to create a mirrored dummy in order to use custom resolutions. This works for Sidecar and other non-native devices (like DisplayLink) and also enables scaling beyond the native resolution of the display panel on Apple Silicon (for added screen real estate). Follow these steps to do this:
Create New Dummy
optionCreate and Configure for...
option at the bottom that matches your display.Connect and Set up Mirroring
.It's that simple. Afterwards you should see your dummy mirrored to your display where you can use the slider to change the resolution quickly.
Please note that the dummy/virtual screen mirroring method is a workaround and have some drawbacks compared to native smooth scaling - there might be sleep issues, color issues (flickering on some setups), mouse cursor related problems on Monterey 12.5 and beyond. Whenever possible, it is advised to use the native smooth scaling method.
To help with mouse cursor related macOS bugs when a virtual screen is mirrored, you can go to System Settings
> Accessibility
> Display
> Pointer size
and slightly increase the pointer size above normal.
Mirror Target
> Stop Mirroring
) and reconfigure the mirror under the dummy in the display list Mirror Target
> Display Name
.Settings
> Set as main
under the display in the app menu.Settings
> Move Next to ...
from the app menu.You can join the discussion on the BetterDisplay Discord channel. If you have any issues or questions, don't hesitate to ask!
You can support development by purchasing a BetterDisplay Pro license directly in the app. Just navigate to Settings
(gear icon) > Pro
and click on Buy BetterDisplay Pro
. Please note that even if you don't buy the app, you can still use many of the features for free (if you are a non-business user).
Check out the license terms for the app.
For more info, see this discussion.
I am thankful for each of you who contributed to the project.
Generous contributors, who donated $50 or more for the open-source project:
Additional notable contributors, who donated $20 or more:
Derek Johnson Jerry C Jung Yeop (Steve) Kim Jason Kaz Nikola wanyeki Felix Emilio P Egido Thomas Varghese Reactual Stephen Richardson Peter Szombati NP David Verdonck Knut Holm Jan Behrmann Danilo Andrew Braithwaite Splay Display Incognito Florian Gross David Richardson Jari Hanhela |
William Edney David W Chetan Kunte Martin Clayton Nikola Milojević Wolf1701 Arthur Müller Tom Dai Jeff Lopes Jormsen Yeo Chang Long Wayne G Udome Bart Krijnen jviide Keezy SenPng Jakub Koňas docljn Adam Lounds Pablo Sichert Ville Rinne Gheorghe Aurel Pacurar Peter F. |
Thomas Brian Jedrzej Gontarczyk Chris Brooks Wang Yang Arjen Peter Cole Simon Jarvis mgiiklel Eric Alasdair Friedemann Wachsmuth Pranav Raj S Eddy George Billios Alfred Visnevsky Martin Cohen HWM Oliver Eilhard Alastair Thomson Örn Arnarson Chris Spiegl Radim Balner yipru petertriho + guest supporters |
Please don't forget to star the GitHub page and spread the word about the app. :)