A Mac screen dimmer that goes
below minimum brightness

When minimum brightness is still too bright

Anyone who has worked at night knows the moment: brightness is at one bar, the room is dark, and the screen still feels like a lamp. It happens because the brightness keys control backlight power, and Apple caps how low the backlight goes. External monitors are worse; many ignore the Mac's brightness keys entirely.

Nox works one layer deeper. It scales the display's gamma tables, the same mechanism macOS uses for color calibration, so output keeps dropping smoothly past the hardware floor. Start with the backlight as low as it goes, then let Nox take it from there.

More than one way to make a screen darker

Pure dimming is the blunt tool. Nox gives you the full set, each adjustable on its own:

• Dimming scales all light output down, below the minimum the keys allow.
• Black point lifts pure black to soft gray, taming harsh contrast between dark windows and bright content.
• Contrast flattens the difference between the brightest and darkest parts of the screen.
• Color temperature and tint warm or reshape the light itself, with 12 presets and unlimited custom ones.
• Per-display control dims the monitor that needs it without touching the others.
• A global keyboard shortcut toggles everything instantly.

The dimmer exists because of the audience Nox is built for: people with light sensitivity, for whom "screen too bright" is not an annoyance but the end of a workday. If that is you, the research behind Nox's spectral presets is worth five minutes; filters like FL-41 and narrow-band green target the specific wavelengths studied in photophobia research, not just overall brightness.

Honest limits

Gamma dimming reduces light output, not backlight power, so it will not save battery the way the brightness keys do, and at extreme settings bright areas compress toward gray. That tradeoff is inherent to every software dimmer. Nox's answer is control: combine a low backlight with moderate gamma dimming and a black point lift, and you get a screen that is genuinely dim and still readable.

What Nox changes on your Mac

Nox is a menu bar app for macOS 14 and later, downloaded as a signed DMG from this site. While running, it writes to the display's gamma tables through the standard macOS display APIs. It installs no kernel or system extensions and requires no account. Toggling the filter off or quitting Nox restores your display immediately. To uninstall, quit Nox and move it from Applications to the Trash. Details on data handling are in the privacy policy; support is support@getnoxapp.com.