This is just a little tip I picked up recently. Sometimes it becomes necessary to control your screen brightness from your iMac’s top menubar. However, if you go into the Display pane in the System Preferences app, there is no option to do this. Never fear, because it can still be done by following these simple steps:
Open “System Preferences” app.
Scroll down to “Control Center”.
In “Control Center”, scroll down to “Display”.
Set “Display” to “Always Show in Menu Bar”.
That’s it.
Some of you might be wondering why you would even want to do this, considering that you already have brightness keys on your keyboard. Well, there are situations where it could become necessary. I encountered one such situation last month.
Very briefly, we were struck by a Category 5 typhoon in May of this year. As a result, I was without power for 28.5 days, and without home Internet service for just under four months.
Well, when my power finally came back on, and I pulled my mouse and keyboard out of my desk drawer – I always keep them there when I am not using them due to having two very rascally cats – I discovered that the keyboard was totally wonky, and really messing up my computer in a variety of ways. For example, even though the caps lock key was off, I could only type in uppercase letters. Trying to select one item in a Finder window – as opposed to all of them – was also very difficult. And there were other oddities.
I finally realized that the problem was actually the keyboard, and not the computer itself. So there I was with two computers – which I work on daily – and only one working keyboard. So what I had to do multiple times throughout the day, was unplug the keyboard from one iMac, and attach it to the other. Back and forth, back and forth. It quickly became rather tiresome.
Normally, I keep the brightness dimmed on the server machine, particularly when I am sleeping. Well, there are times when I don’t necessarily need to type on my server machine, but I do need to see what is happening on it, which means having to turn up the brightness.
So, rather than having to reconnect the keyboard to it in order to turn up the brightness, I googled and found a way to re-add the brightness control to the top menubar. So, until my new keyboard comes in, all I have to do is use my mouse to turn up the brightness on that machine.
Another option would be to use screen sharing to access one computer from the other over your LAN.
You can look at the remote computer’s display directly, and use screen sharing when you need to interact with it. So being able to remotely manipulate that screen’s brightness would be a useful feature.
True indeed, David. While I have been aware of screen sharing for a long time, for some reason, – don’t ask me – I have just never gotten into it. On the other hand, being 70 years old now, maybe getting up out of my chair so many times is good exercise for me, although I still do my regular exercise every week. 