// the find
xanderfrangos/twinkle-tray
Easily manage the brightness of your monitors in Windows from the system tray
Twinkle Tray fills a real gap in Windows: external monitors don't get brightness control through the OS, and this app adds a system tray flyout that handles them via DDC/CI and WMI. It's a polished Electron app for multi-monitor setups on Windows 10/11, actively maintained with 8k+ stars and a surprisingly sane feature set for what could have been a weekend hack.
DDC/CI support is the core value and it's done properly — the app vendors its own native node-ddcci module rather than shelling out to a third-party CLI, which means it can actually read current brightness levels and not just write them blind. The command-line interface for scripting brightness changes is a genuine nice-to-have that most similar tools skip entirely. Localization coverage is unusually broad for a single-dev utility (40+ languages via Weblate integration). Time-of-day and idle-based auto-dimming are built in, not bolted on as an afterthought.
Electron for a system tray utility is a hard pill to swallow — it ships a full Chromium runtime for a brightness slider, which means ~200MB on disk and a non-trivial memory footprint sitting in the background all day. The native modules (seven of them, all vendored in-tree as submodule-style directories) require node-gyp and MSVC build tools to compile, making the dev setup painful on a fresh machine. DDC/CI compatibility is genuinely unreliable on certain GPU/monitor combos, especially through USB-C docks — the README documents this honestly but there's not much the app can do about it. No tests visible anywhere in the repo; for code that talks directly to hardware over an undocumented-ish protocol, that's a risk.