Glow

Lightweight tray utility to control your monitors' hardware brightness via DDC/CI.

English · Русский

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Features

• True hardware brightness — drives external monitors over DDC/CI (Dxva2.dll), not a software overlay.
• Multi-monitor — auto-detects every connected display and shows a separate slider for each, labelled with the real model name (read from EDID).
• Night light — warm the screen with an on/off toggle and intensity slider; applied to every monitor and restored on exit.
• Near-zero footprint — no background timers or polling; the app sleeps in the message loop and only wakes on a click. Idle CPU ≈ 0%.
• Single self-contained .exe — no .NET runtime to install.
• Auto localization — UI follows the Windows display language (English / Русский), English fallback.
• Matches your theme — the slider uses the current Windows accent color.
• Silent autostart — optional launch with Windows via HKCU\…\Run.
• Auto-update — checks GitHub Releases and updates itself on your confirmation.
• Clean uninstall — removes the app, the autostart key and all config; leaves no trace.

How it works

Click the Glow icon in the system tray (next to the volume icon) → a small popup appears with one brightness slider per monitor. Drag, and the change is written straight to the display hardware. Right-click the icon for Run at startup and Exit.

DDC/CI must be supported and enabled by the monitor. Most external desktop monitors support it; many laptop internal panels do not (and are simply skipped).

Installation

1. Download Glow-Setup-x.y.z.exe from the latest release.
2. Run it and tick Start Glow automatically when Windows starts.
3. Glow appears in your tray. That's it.

Prefer no installer? Grab Glow-x.y.z-portable.exe from the same release and run it directly — it's fully self-contained.

Tech stack

Area	Choice
Language	C# / .NET 8
UI	WinForms — frameless, hand-drawn dark popup
Brightness API	Win32 DDC/CI P/Invoke (Dxva2.dll)
Monitor names	EDID parsed from the registry (no WMI)
Packaging	Self-contained single-file exe
Installer	Inno Setup 6
CI/CD	GitHub Actions → build, package, publish a Release

Building from source

Requires the .NET 8 SDK and, for the installer, Inno Setup 6.

# Publish the self-contained single-file exe
dotnet publish src/Glow/Glow.csproj -c Release -r win-x64 `
  --self-contained true -p:PublishSingleFile=true -o publish

# Build the installer
& "C:\Program Files (x86)\Inno Setup 6\ISCC.exe" installer\glow.iss `
  "/DSourceExe=$PWD\publish\Glow.exe"
# -> installer\Output\Glow-Setup-1.0.0.exe

The tray icon is drawn at runtime; the .exe icon (src/Glow/glow.ico) is committed and can be regenerated from the logo with tools/Make-Icon.ps1.

Releasing

Push a version tag and CI builds the exe, packages the installer and attaches both to a new GitHub Release:

git tag v1.0.0
git push origin v1.0.0

Repository layout

glow/
├─ src/Glow/            # application source
│  ├─ Native/           # Win32 / DDC-CI P/Invoke
│  ├─ Monitors/         # monitor discovery, names, brightness
│  ├─ Localization/     # EN/RU strings
│  ├─ Startup/          # HKCU autostart toggle
│  ├─ UI/               # tray icon, popup, slider, theme
│  └─ glow.ico
├─ installer/glow.iss   # Inno Setup script
├─ tools/Make-Icon.ps1  # icon generator
├─ assets/glow.svg      # source logo
└─ .github/workflows/   # CI/CD

License

MIT