Auto-dim your Mac screen at night · anchored to your bedtime

Your screen should
wind down when you do.

Daily Dimmer is an automatic screen-dimmer schedule for Mac. Set your bedtime once, and your screen's brightness and warmth taper toward it like a sunset, every evening, across every monitor. Ember-calm by lights-out, gently bright again after you wake.

Get it in DisplayDial

Daily Dimmer is a feature of DisplayDial, the Mac display command center.

Full until 7:30pm · dimmest at 11:00pm bedtime · full again by 7:30am drag the moon to your bedtime
12pm6pm12am6am 🌙

This is the actual shape Daily Dimmer follows: a melatonin-aware descent starting about 3.5 hours before bedtime, your chosen darkest point exactly at bedtime, and a gentle 30-minute morning ramp.

Why a schedule beats a switch

Night Shift flips a switch. Sunsets don't.

Apple's Night Shift warms your screen's color at a fixed time and stops there: no brightness change, no gradual descent, a warmth cap users call "way too warm or not enough," and no way to anchor it to when you actually sleep. Blue-light apps like f.lux warm the color too, but your screen stays just as bright at 11pm as it was at noon. Brightness is the half they leave out.

01 · anchor

Set your bedtime

Not sunset in your timezone, your actual bedtime. 11:00pm means ember-calm at exactly 11:00pm.

02 · taper

Brightness + warmth descend together

Starting about 3.5 hours before bed, both taper continuously along a melatonin-aware curve, down to a candle-warm 1900K and your chosen darkest level.

03 · wake

Mornings come back gently

After your wake time, the screen brightens over 30 minutes. The first email of the day is not a floodlight.

Real settings, real app

A screen dimmer schedule you set once.

Daily Dimmer schedule settings in DisplayDial: start dimming time, bedtime, darkest point, and morning ramp
  • Every monitor, not just the laptop. Built-in display and external monitors dim together on the same curve.
  • It respects your hands. Adjust brightness yourself and the schedule pauses, then quietly resumes. Pause for 10 minutes or the whole night in one tap.
  • A hard 5% floor. The dimmer is engineered so your screen can never go accidentally black, no matter how dark the schedule goes.
  • Tunable everything. Wind-down start, darkest brightness, darkest warmth, wake time, ramp length: all yours.

See it in DisplayDial

Works with your AI

Ask Claude to adjust tonight, not the settings pane.

DisplayDial (the app Daily Dimmer ships in) bundles a local MCP server, so Claude on your Mac can move your bedtime curve conversationally: later start on a work night, warmer floor for a movie, back to normal tomorrow.

Claude Local by design · + any MCP-speaking desktop client

Runs entirely on your Mac and never opens a network socket. AI requests pass through the same 5% anti-lockout floor as the app itself, so your screen can never be talked into going black.

Try asking Claude

“I'm working late tonight; push my dimming start to 11pm just for today.”

dim_snooze() holds tonight's curve back, and tomorrow's schedule returns untouched.

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Questions people ask

How do I automatically dim my Mac screen at night?
macOS can lower brightness on battery or warm colors with Night Shift, but it has no built-in way to schedule brightness itself. Daily Dimmer (part of DisplayDial) does exactly that: an automatic evening descent of brightness and warmth anchored to your bedtime, across built-in and external displays.
Can I schedule a screen dimmer on a Mac?
Yes. Daily Dimmer is a bedtime-anchored schedule, not a fixed timer: you set your bedtime and darkest point, and the curve handles every evening automatically, including a gentle morning return.
Is this the same as Night Shift or f.lux?
No. Those warm your screen's color. Daily Dimmer tapers color AND brightness together, continuously, the way an actual sunset works, and it is anchored to your bedtime rather than your timezone's sunset. It also coexists politely with Night Shift if you keep it on.
Does it work with external monitors?
Yes. Every connected display follows the curve. DisplayDial (the app Daily Dimmer ships in) also gives each monitor a real hardware brightness slider for daytime use.
Can it make my screen darker than the minimum brightness?
Yes. At the bottom of the curve, a click-through dimming layer takes the screen below the hardware floor for genuinely dark rooms, with a hard 5% anti-lockout limit so it can never go accidentally black.
What is Daily Dimmer part of?
Daily Dimmer is the sleep-schedule feature of DisplayDial, a Mac display command center that also gives every monitor a real hardware brightness valve, presets, and an idle energy saver. One app, one dial per screen.
Wind down tonight

Get Daily Dimmer, inside DisplayDial.

DisplayDial is preparing its first public build. Join the waitlist for early access and the founding price, or head over to see the whole command center.

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