Clight VS BetterDisplay

There is also Clight (https://github.com/FedeDP/Clight) if you want automatic backlight adjusting given ambient brightness. It supports external monitors through ddcutil C library and has many more features to offer.

Here are two suggestions from the Arch Wiki, try Clight or macbook-lighter. Clight looks to be continuously maintained, so I'd try that one first.

Clight can do that. See the config file.

Installed light, clight, clightd and acpilight

If you're using a laptop screen, there's Clight, which can turn your webcam into an ambient light sensor.

Clight is a lightweight C user daemon utility program that turns your webcam into a light sensor which it depends on to automatically adjust your screen’s display based on ambient light. Just like Redshift, Clight can manipulate the temperature of your screen and it derived inspiration from Calise.

Check out Clight. There's also a GUI for it.

The only downside to Clight? You need to build not only Clight and Clightd from source, but also 2 dependencies (libmodule and ddcutil), as well as the Clight-GUI if you want to use it. That is, unless you use Arch Linux / Manjaro (there are AUR packages available), NixOS, Exherbo or Void Linux, for which there are packages available.

> the 4K monitors the author recommends are not good for macOS due to them not supporting native retina scaling above 1080p

Is this true even with the help of 3rd party apps?

My 3840x1600 ultrawide has that problem using the native screen resolution tools but I can get it to full-res HiDPI using BetterDisplay [0].

[0] https://betterdisplay.pro/

2. "BetterDisplay" for better scaling quality on bigger screens, especially if you have a 4k ultrawide. https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

It isn't a device, it's a software tool. It doesn't make the monitor magically 2x the resolution; it can trick macos to render onto a 5k buffer and then downscale the output to the physical display so it looks not-broken.

https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

I'm not saying that it'll make 4k look good. I'm saying macOS is unusable on native resolutions - everything is either too small or too blurry, so a 4k display won't do me any good. 25x14 is the sweet spot for me, but I guess Apple decided I'm holding it wrong.

Download BetterDisplay (free to try, $18 for Pro, and well worth it IMO): https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

This article is very good to explain this ppi thing https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/ also an extra app can make some monitors display sharper (hidpi) https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

It can be found here: https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

So I installed the Better Display 2 app [link] , enabled HiDPI 1280x720, and suddenly everything looked both extremely sharp and in a good size. Judging by the size of the screenshot, it mimics Retina 2560 × 1440 and scales it down 2x to 1280x720, making it HiDPI. I can totally recommend you to do as I did.