3 reasons why Twinkle Tray is an essential Windows app for desktop users
There are plenty of apps out there that can enhance your Windows 11 experience in one away or another, such as by replacing the Start menu or the File Explorer. But sometimes, the simplest apps are the best, and recently, I've discovered the wonders of Twinkle Tray, and I can tell you right now that this is an absolutely essential app if you have a desktop PC or an external monitor.
It has a simple premise: changing the brightness of your monitors. But what it does around that is incredibly useful.
4Windows is stupidly limited
I can't change the brightness of an external monitor?
Let's start with the reason to get this app in the first place, and that's the fact that the built-in brightness slider in Windows is only made to work with internal displays, such as laptops. If you connect an external monitor, you have no control over its brightness unless you use the built-in settings on the monitor or there's an official app that lets you change those settings in Windows. This limitation is frankly ridiculous and makes no sense.
So, Twinkle Tray solves that. It supports all the major communication methods that monitors use to report brightness to your computer, so no matter if you have an external monitor or an internal one, Twinkle Tray can easily adjust their brightness right from the taskbar, or even using hotkeys. This alone makes the app worth installing. It's so cumbersome to change settings using the navigation nub on a monitor, 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 even more than that. External monitors use a communication method called DDC or CI, and this supports some additional controls like contrast, volume, and even the power state. That gives you another layer of control customize your monitor experience right from within Windows. The monitor's volume usually doesn't sync with Windows' own volume setting, but it's still great to have this so you can fine tune the volume level that much more.
3Control all your monitors quickly
Multi-monitor setups are welcome
Twinkle Tray is already a great app if you have a single monitor, but it gets that much better if you have more. Twinkle Tray displays the brightness of all your monitors when you click the icon on the taskbar, so you can easily adjust and match all of them.
But there's more to it than that, too. 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 varying brightness ranges, Twinkle Tray gets even more clever. If you dive into the settings, you can change the brightness range of each monitor, so that the maximum and minimum brightness of each panel is matched and you have a more consistent experience even with different monitor models.
You can also reorder and rename monitor in the Twinkle Tray flyout, so you can quickly identify each screen in your setup without having to remember complex names.
2Automations and ease of use
Make things easier than ever
Finally, Twinkle Tray also offers a range of options to make things even easier for you, starting with automatic brightness adjustments. Typically, you'd need a monitor with ambient light sensing to be able to do this, but with Twinkle Tray, you can set brightness levels to adjust at specific times, so even if you don't have a sensor like that, you can change the brightness automatically to match the time of day. Twinkle tray can also automatically dim your displays after a period of inactivity, something that, again, Windows only does for the internal screen.
Hotkeys are also here to help, as they let you change the brightness of your monitors without ever opening the flyout. You can set different hotkeys for each display and for all displays at once, so the adjustments are exactly what you want them to be. And if that's not enough, Twinkle Tray has yet another cool option where you can adjust the brightness of your monitors by just moving your mouse over the system tray icon and scrolling the mouse wheel (or touchpad). It just expands on what Windows lets you do in basically every way.
I always want Twinkle Tray on my PC
Twinkle Tray has become one of those apps I always want to install on my PC because it just makes it so much easier to change the brightness of my monitor. Before this, I just ended up leaving the brightness untouched all day, but now, I can easily make it brighter during the day and dim it all the way down later at night. Sunlight comes in through my window and can be pretty harsh, so there's a lot of fluctuation in the lighting environment, but this makes it so much easier to adapt. I highly recommend this app to anyone with a desktop PC.
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