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MaxNits

MacBook Pro XDR displays can hit ~1000 nits, but macOS caps everyday use at 600 to save battery. There are a couple of paid apps that remove this cap for a few dollars. I built a free, open-source one instead — MaxNits.

No purchase, no subscription, no menu bar icon. It's a command-line tool.

Install

git clone https://github.com/yogeshvar/maxnits.git
cd maxnits
make install
maxnits on

How it works

Two small overlay windows, both using only public macOS APIs — no gamma-table hacks or private frameworks.

  1. A 1×1 pixel invisible window renders a pixel brighter than SDR white, which switches the display into Extended Dynamic Range mode and unlocks headroom above the 600-nit ceiling.
  2. A second, fullscreen, click-through overlay uses compositingFilter = "multiply" to scale everything beneath it by a factor above 1.0, up to the panel's real limit.

Both overlays are owned by a small background daemon — quitting it (maxnits quit) or a crash instantly returns the display to normal.

Usage

MaxNits runs as a background daemon; the CLI starts it automatically the first time you need it. 

maxnits on              turn the brightness boost on
maxnits off              turn the brightness boost off
maxnits set 70           set the boost to a specific level (0-100)
maxnits up [amount]      increase the boost (default 10%)
maxnits down [amount]    decrease the boost (default 10%)
maxnits status            show whether it's running and its current level
maxnits quit              stop the background daemon entirely
maxnits enable-login      start MaxNits automatically at login
maxnits disable-login     stop starting it automatically

Requirements

Credits

The EDR + multiply-overlay technique was pioneered by apps like BrightIntosh (GPL) and used in FullBright and BetterDisplay's "Software Metal Upscaling" mode. MaxNits is an independent, from-scratch MIT-licensed implementation of the same idea.

Source on GitHub · MIT License

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