1. Intro

PangoBright is a tool that will simply dim your screen (or screens if you have multiple). It’s useful when you’re working late at night, or you want to leave the screen on for longer periods of time but don’t want put your PC to sleep, or simply you have multiple monitors and you want to watch a movie or play video-games in just one of them.

It doesn’t sound mega useful now that I’m writing it down, but funnily enough I use this one super often. I have a keyboard shortcut set to open and quit the app, so anytime I’m taking just a longer than usual break, or leaving the PC unattended for 20-30 minutes, I just press the KB shortcut and dim the screen. When I’m back I press it again and it’s off. I had a couple of incidents in the past where my screens have developed dead pixels from leaving them on (on purpose or accidentally) while rendering, so I’ve sort of gotten used to this. I do recommend just turning the screens off if you’re leaving your PC unattended for longer -duh!

2. Download PangoBright

You can get PangoBright here. There’s a very tiny “Download” button on their main site, so I just linked the download page directly:

PangoBright screen dimming utility, from Pangolin Laser Systems

3. Using PangoBright

Using PangoBright is very easy. Simply select the level of brightness (from 100% to 20%) and, if you want, a fade-out color. Exit the app or return to 100% to remove the effect. If you have multiple screens, you will be able to pick brightness for each screen individually, which is awesome if you’re watching a movie or playing a video-game and you want to tone everything else down. I just installed Windows on my Mac to get this screenshot so the multiple screen dialogue won’t show with just 1 monitor.

✅ You’re done! I am planning to expand this entry with a write-up on how I created my keyboard shortcut to toggle PangoBright on and off, but since it’s based on AutoHotKey, I will leave it until after I’ve published my article on it. Cheers! :)