Key findings
- Windows doesn’t have brightness control for external monitors, but Twinkle Tray easily fixes this problem.
- Twinkle Tray supports DDC/CI for additional monitor controls such as contrast and volume.
- Automate brightness adjustments, link multiple monitors, and use hotkeys for easy control.
There are numerous apps that can improve your Windows 11 experience in one way or another, such as replacing the Start menu or File Explorer. But sometimes the simplest apps are the best, and recently I discovered the wonders of Twinkle Tray, and I can already tell you that this is an absolutely essential app if you have a desktop PC or an external monitor.
It has a simple premise: change the brightness of your monitors. But what it does with it is incredibly useful.
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4 Windows is unfortunately limited
I can’t change the brightness of an external monitor?
Let’s start with the reason why you should get this app in the first place. The brightness slider built into Windows only works with internal displays, like laptops. If you connect an external monitor, you have no control over its brightness unless you use the monitor’s built-in settings or there’s an official app that lets you change those settings in Windows. This limitation is frankly ridiculous and makes no sense.
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Twinkle Tray solves this problem. It supports all the major communication methods that monitors use to report brightness to your computer. Whether you have an external or internal monitor, Twinkle Tray can easily adjust brightness right from the taskbar or even via hotkeys. That alone makes installing the app worthwhile. It’s so cumbersome to change settings from a monitor’s navigation knob, and official software is often so bloated that I really don’t want to install it. Twinkle Tray is a super simple app that just gets the job done.
However, it can be more than that. External monitors use a communication method called DDC or CI, which supports some additional controls like contrast, volume, and even power state. This gives you another layer of control to customize your monitor experience right in Windows. The monitor volume isn’t usually synced with Windows’ volume setting, but it’s still great to have this so you can fine-tune the volume even more.
3 Control all your monitors quickly
Multi-monitor setups are welcome
Twinkle Tray is already a great app if you only have one monitor, but if you have multiple, it gets even better. Twinkle Tray shows the brightness of all your monitors when you click the icon in the taskbar, so you can easily adjust and match them all.
But that’s not all. You can link the brightness of all your monitors so they all change at the same time and stay consistent. And if you have different monitor models with different brightness ranges, Twinkle Tray gets even cleverer. If you dive into the settings, you can change the brightness range of each monitor, so it matches the maximum and minimum brightness of each panel and gives you a more consistent experience even with different monitor models.
You can also rearrange and rename monitors in the Twinkle Tray flyout, allowing you to quickly identify each screen in your setup without having to remember complex names.
2 Automation and user-friendliness
Make things easier than ever
Finally, Twinkle Tray also offers a number of options to make things even easier for you, starting with automatic brightness adjustments. Normally, you’d need a monitor with an ambient light sensor for this, but Twinkle Tray lets you set brightness levels to adjust at specific times. Even if you don’t have such a sensor, you can still automatically adjust brightness based on the time of day. Twinkle Tray can also automatically dim your displays after a period of inactivity, which again, Windows only does for the internal screen.
Hotkeys are also useful as they allow you to change the brightness of your monitors without opening the flyout. You can set different hotkeys for each screen and for all screens at once, so the adjustments are exactly how you want them. And if that’s not enough, Twinkle Tray has another cool option that lets you adjust the brightness of your monitors by simply hovering over the taskbar icon and rotating the mouse wheel (or touchpad). It simply expands the capabilities of Windows in virtually every way.
I want to always have Twinkle Tray on my PC
Twinkle Tray is one of the apps I always want to have on my PC because it makes it so much easier to change the brightness of my monitor. Before, I left the brightness the same throughout the day, but now I can easily make it brighter during the day and then dim it all the way down later in the evening. The sunlight comes through my window and can be quite bright, so the lighting levels vary a lot, but this makes it so much easier to adjust. I highly recommend this app to anyone with a desktop PC.
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