The two controls macOS is missing
macOS gives you a brightness slider and an auto-brightness checkbox, and nothing in between. You cannot tell it how eager to be. In a dim room it lights the keys brighter than you want, and in ordinary room light it suppresses them entirely even when you would rather have a faint glow.
Dim Keys reads the ambient light sensor once a second and drives the backlight itself, from two settings you choose.
A ceiling it never exceeds
Four presets, or any level in between on the slider.
- Off
- Keys stay dark at every light level
- Min
- The dimmest the hardware can light
- Med
- 35%
- Max
- No cap
Sensitivity you set yourself
How dark it must be before the keys come on at all.
- Low
- Below 7 lux — an unlit room
- Med
- Below 48 lux — a dimly lit room
- High
- Below 120 lux — normal room light
High is more eager than macOS itself. It lights the keys in ordinary room light, where stock macOS gives you nothing.
Small, quiet, and honest about it
Stays out of the way
One menu bar icon, no Dock icon, no window. Idle CPU measures 0.0% — it sleeps until the light actually changes. You can hide the icon too.
Nothing leaves your Mac
The only network request it ever makes is asking GitHub for the latest version number. No accounts, no analytics, no telemetry.
Signed and notarized by Apple
It opens with a double-click — no Gatekeeper detour, no right-click trick. Universal, so it runs native on Apple Silicon and Intel.
Open source, MIT
About 1.5 MB, one binary, no frameworks bundled. Read it, build it yourself, or take it apart.
Install
- Download the
.dmgand open it. - Drag Dim Keys into Applications.
- Open it. It appears in the menu bar — click the icon for the panel.
Keep it in Applications if you use Launch at login. macOS registers the login item at whatever path the app is sitting in, so leaving it in your Downloads folder means the login item breaks the moment you tidy up.
Requirements
A MacBook with a backlit keyboard and an ambient light sensor. Apple Silicon or Intel.
macOS 13 or later — though everything has only been developed and verified on macOS 26, so anything earlier is genuinely untested rather than merely unsupported. There is no public API for keyboard backlight control on macOS at all, so the app uses a private one. If that differs on your version it does not misbehave; it simply reports that no keyboard backlight was found. If that happens, open an issue and say which macOS version you are on.