MonitorControl VS Lunar

Compare MonitorControl vs Lunar and see what are their differences.

MonitorControl

đź–Ą Control your display's brightness & volume on your Mac as if it was a native Apple Display. Use Apple Keyboard keys or custom shortcuts. Shows the native macOS OSDs. (by MonitorControl)
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MonitorControl Lunar
191 190
25,769 4,247
2.9% -
7.0 8.9
about 1 month ago 7 days ago
Swift Swift
MIT License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

MonitorControl

Posts with mentions or reviews of MonitorControl. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-10-27.

Lunar

Posts with mentions or reviews of Lunar. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-10.
  • Show HN: Multi-monitor KVM using just a USB switch
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Feb 2024
    I've had good luck with the Lunar app - it manages my Dell and LG monitors on an M2. (No affiliation) https://lunar.fyi
  • If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Dec 2023
    I believe in most cases, DRM would not exist if people wouldn't have started pirating digital content. We're also to blame for the state of things.

    Just like I would not bother to buy and use a bike lock if people would not steal bikes in the first place. It's a bad analogy though, like all analogies are, since if I sell my bike I can't make it stop working for the buyer at a later time. But that's the big difference between digital and physical.

    I have been working on and off on anti-piracy measures for my Lunar app (https://lunar.fyi/) and as much as I want this to not affect normal users, the app can still stop working after a decade or two if the Paddle licensing server doesn't respond as I expect it for example, and I'm no longer around to fix it. This could be regarded as DRM by some.

    But I would have never wasted time with this if people would not crack my app in the first place AND demand customer support and flood my dashboard with errors unrelated to the normal functioning of the app.

    If piracy isn't stealing, then protecting against it isn't limiting ownership.

    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Dec 2023
    I was comparing anti-piracy measures with DRM, I don't have actual DRM in my app. I can't block users that really bought the app from using it (which is what DRM is notorious for).

    But I do have a license verification for the Pro features (https://lunar.fyi/#pro), and that is what people are cracking in the app. I only added more protection around this verification.

  • MacOS tools to make your life easier
    14 projects | /r/MacOS | 7 Dec 2023
    Lunar
  • YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Oct 2023
    As the dev of a macOS app that breaks all the time because of external hardware, the tone of the article hits close to home. (I’m talking about https://lunar.fyi/ whose brightness control commands can be blocked by USB-C hubs, “smart” monitors, too long cables etc.)

    I had to disable public GitHub issues on the app repo [1] because people seemed to fuel each other with spiteful comments and “why can’t you just!!” sentences.

    The contact form still attracts many such “entitled” people and it hurts to wake up to such messages, but at least I can choose to ignore those if I can’t bring anything to the discussion. There’s no peer pressure.

    These people are expecting too much from a handful of developers who are sharing a lot of free work and time that could have been spent better than hunting new IDs in URLs and updating regular expressions.

    [1] https://github.com/alin23/Lunar

  • I2c-USB-hub: An i2C Controllable USB 2.0 Hub
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Sep 2023
    Last year I bought a second computer for my music studio. I wanted to use the same set of 2 monitors and wired keyboard + trackpad on both machines.

    I wrote simple scripts to switch my monitor inputs with keyboard shortcuts (even simpler with Lunar, amazing new Mac app — https://lunar.fyi), which saved me from having to press annoying input-source buttons.

    But I couldn't for the life of me find a simple, suitable software controllable KVM switch. That still requires the hardware button to be controlled, so frustrating.

  • Changing my relationship with GitHub Copilot
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Aug 2023
    Some people like the process of writing code, more than the end result. I had a few months of that feeling, but nowadays it’s rarely about writing for me.

    Just the other day I used Copilot to explain the disassembly of macOS KeyboardBacklight code, so that I can turn off the keyboard lights when using Lunar’s Blackout (https://lunar.fyi/#blackout)

    It even helped me generate the ObjC function signatures from assembly and use the right calling convention in Swift afterwards. It really feels like magic.

    I would have no joy in writing that code, it’s mostly bridging and translation anyway. I just need it to do this thing so that people can take advantage of it.

  • A collection of useful Mac Apps
    32 projects | /r/macapps | 13 Jul 2023
    Lunar - Price: Free (optional premium one-time purchase) Menu bar app for macOS that allows you to adjust your display's brightness and color temperature. (Pro version also available.)
  • MBP16 M2 + Dell u3419w
    2 projects | /r/MacOS | 11 Jul 2023
    For controlling the real hardware volume of the monitor, you can try my Lunar app. MonitorControl does not work with M2.
  • How to build a website without frameworks and tons of libraries
    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Jul 2023
    I use something very similar on https://lunar.fyi and https://lowtechguys.com but I wouldn’t call this “simple” anymore.

    They use Jinja templating, I prefer Slim (https://github.com/slim-template/slim#syntax-example) which has a more Pythonic syntax (there is plim [0] in Python for that)

    I use Tailwind as well for terse styling and fast experimentation (allows me to write a darkMode-aware and responsive 100 line CSS in a single line with about 10 classes)

    For interaction I can write CoffeeScript directly in the page [1] and have it compiled by plim.

    I run a Caddy static server [2] and use Syncthing [3] to have every file save deployed instantly to my Hetzner server.

    I use entr [4] and livereloadx [5] to rebuild the pages and do hot reload on file save. All the commands are managed in a simple Makefile [6]

    ———

    You can already see how the footnotes take up a large chunk of this comment, this is not my idea of simple. Sure, the end result is readable static HTML and I never have to fight obscure React errors, but it’s a high effort setup for starters.

    Simple for me would be: write markdown files for pages, a simple CSS for general styling (should be optional), click to deploy on my domain. Images should automatically be resized to multiple sizes and optimized, videos re-encoded for smaller filesize etc.

    I have mostly implemented that for myself (https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/How%20I%20write%20this%20blog...) but it feels fragile. I’d rather pay for a professional solution.

    [0] https://plim.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

    [1] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/src/rcmd...

    [2] https://caddyserver.com/docs/command-line#caddy-file-server

    [3] https://syncthing.net

    [4] https://github.com/eradman/entr

    [5] https://nitoyon.github.io/livereloadx/

    [6] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/Makefile

What are some alternatives?

When comparing MonitorControl and Lunar you can also consider the following projects:

BetterDisplay - Unlock your displays on your Mac! Flexible HiDPI scaling, XDR/HDR extra brightness, virtual screens, DDC control, extra dimming, PIP/streaming, EDID override and lots more!

BetterDummy - 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! [Moved to: https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay]

Monitorian - A Windows desktop tool to adjust the brightness of multiple monitors with ease

yabai - A tiling window manager for macOS based on binary space partitioning

RDM - Easily set Mac Retina display to higher unsupported resolutions

RatPoison - Latest Ver: 1.7; Default Menu Key is F1; Charlatano's Successor; dn

display-switch - Turn a $30 USB switch into a full-featured multi-monitor KVM switch

eul - 🖥️ macOS status monitoring app written in SwiftUI.

Mousecape - Cursor Manager for OSX

Hackintool - The Swiss army knife of vanilla Hackintoshing