Rusty Twinkle Tray

A small utility for quickly adjusting the brightness of external monitors using the DDC/CI protocol.

Rusty Twinkle Tray is a work-in-progress rewrite of Twinkle Tray in Rust. A central goal of this rewrite is to start much faster so that monitor brightness can be adjusted as soon as possible after logging in.

Screenshot

Features

• Can automatically restore the last set brightness after¹:
  • Changing display settings
  • Waking up from sleep
• Small (~900kb) standalone executable
• Built using native OS controls instead of electron
• As inactive as possible when not in use
• Minimal dependencies

¹Many monitors tend to "forget" settings set over DDC/CI after temporarily losing power

Precompiled Binaries

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Building

This program is written in Rust and requires a working Rust installation if you want to compile it yourself.

This program can be built by simply running the following:

cargo build --release

Contributing

Toolkit

This program uses the default UWP Controls hosted inside an XAML island.

Unfortunately, the Microsoft-provided windows-rs crate does not include bindings for the Window.UI.Xaml namespace. To nevertheless use it with Rust, this project directly uses windows-bindgen to manually generate the missing bindings (libs/windows-ext). However, the generated bindings are quite large (~1.5m LOC; ~1m of that in a single file). To keep the IDE happy, this project additionally uses a post-processor (/libs/codegen) that deletes many unused functions. The file libs/windows-ext/Codegen.toml controls which functions are kept. To regenerate the bindings after editing this file, run just update-bindings (requires just).

Todos

• Settings window
  • Toggle autostart
  • Toggle brightness restore
  • Rename monitors
  • Reorder monitors
  • Change various delays/timeouts
• Fluent design for Windows 11+
• Respect Dark/Light system setting
• Attempt to restore brightness after waking up from sleep
• Support integrated laptop screens connected over I2C
• Support monitor hot plugging
• Handle auto-hiding taskbar
• Improve themes
• Adapt icon to system theme
• Correctly handle display scaling

License

MIT License