Bug reports for BetterDisplay 5.0.2 pre-release

[Brunni132]

Hi, just reporting in case you didn't know:

[ ] The links on the about page of the Settings dialog don't do anything (not clickable), even Check for updates.
[ ] Suspend image adjustments keyboard shortcut suspends the classic controls (such as temperature) but not the compositor filter adjustments, such as unsharp and sharpness (killer feature btw, thanks a lot!). Note that clicking on the "Suspend adjustments" option in the Image Adjustments menu DOES suspend the compositor filter, though.
[ ] With the CLI (/Applications/BetterDisplay.app/Contents/MacOS/BetterDisplay args...), a perform operation works without a --name argument, but set won't. I would find it useful to be able to apply the setting to the current display.
[ ] I have tried to make a script to do that automatically (find the active display and pass its ID), but the display listing operations might be buggy? If I do, with my external monitor connected (whether the built-in display is enabled):

$ alias betterdisplay=/Applications/BetterDisplay.app/Contents/MacOS/BetterDisplay
$ betterdisplay get --displayWithMouse
Failed.
$ betterdisplay get --displayWithMainStatus
Failed.
$ betterdisplay get --displayWithFocus
Failed.
$ betterdisplay get --identifiers
Here, the listed JSON is empty if I'm using the internal display, and contains something only if an external display is connected.

[ ] Not a bug report but these revamped menus show up quicker, but they are very slow to load the controls themselves (example in Image Adjustments), and sometimes they can even overload the compositor to a point the mouse will start to stutter (on my M4 Pro). I am not sure what you are doing there, but there might be something off. On my M1 it's slow to the point of being a little annoying.

[waydabber]

Hi @Brunni132

Thanks for the reports. Which macOS version are you using?

1. The links on the About page seem to work (tried on macOS 26 and 27) or I can't reproduce the issue. Do you experience the same problem with the v4.x version?
2. Indeed, will fix this - Include compositor filters in the "Suspend image adjustments" keyboard shortcut #5710
3. Can you give a specific example? When --name (or -n or some other display specifier) is not supplied, the app simply iterates the command through all relevant displays. There may be specific exemptions to this, but that is not the default way it works.
4. Well, these are not display listing operations, they are display specifiers/filters for commands (to specify on which display or displays the command should work).

So for example the following should set the display with mouse to 80% brightness:

betterdisplay set --displayWithMouse -brightness=80%

To get the name of the display with the mouse, you can use this:

betterdisplaycli get -displayWithMouse -identifier=name

5. Yes, the sliders now show up sequentially, this may feel slow with some menus that have many sliders.

[Brunni132]

Ah! Thank you!

Another thing I forgot to mention: on my McBook Air (M1), if I am on the internal panel in the original resolution (1280x800 HiDPI) and use one of the compositor filter effects (like sharpness), the resolution is halved, so it looks like LoDPI.

I didn't try to reproduce it on my M4 yet.

[waydabber]

Yes, this is an inherent limitation for geometry filters it seems with the currently used method.

[waydabber]

Note: I experimented a lot with this - turns out this is a platform limitation with the compositor layer approach: filters that require neighbor pixel processing, the processing resolution is fixed at 1x. The only workaround is to use Self-streaming, but that will introduce a lag and overhead. Color filters or filters that do not need neighbor pixel processing (like Dot Screen etc) will render at full resolution in current macOS versions.

[Brunni132]

Yes I imagine, thank you for checking. I wonder if it's intended, or if there is something (possibly hidden) in the API to make your filter "density-aware". Do you code those filters yourself, or choose them from a library of existing ones?

But well, it's hard for me to have a proper solution. I'd so much love if we could disable font smoothing globally in the OS. Retina is just dense enough that my eyes cannot focus on the pixels, but not dense enough for it to be really sharp (like iPhone's 3x retina), so my eyes fatigue like crazy. No problem at all with Linux and Windows.

Do you think there could be a way to have a loDPI screen scaled up with integer scaling (instead of linear), but not using streaming (which induces lags and limitations as you said, including invisible secure input windows). I.e. anything in the compositer filter API to set the rendering mode?

[waydabber]

No, right now I don't really see an option other than streaming. :(

[Brunni132]

It's alright, thank you. Indeed streaming would be perfect, but it's unusable for me because it introduces a mouse cursor delay.

If only this could be fixed, that'd be a good solution.

I haven't researched, but I guess it must be hard unless macOS allows one to have two cursors, one per screen. But there might be a faster API though, VMWare Fusion has found something to get the cursor to only be one frame late, which in ProMotion makes it basically bearable. The lastest version replaces the Mac cursor with the Windows cursor though, hiding it in the VM instead, so you get no latency but I don't think it'd fit BD.

Oh and on the previous subject, perhaps you should emit a warning when someone's using those filters on a surface with density > 1.0.

As always, thank you so much for your reactivity. I've always been super happy with this app and I love your development model. 🙏🥰

[Brunni132]

Hey mate, not sure I should open a bug report again, but I have noticed, at least on my machine, that when I suspend the enhancements with the keyboard shortcut, then I run this, the adjustments remain suspended, basically the last 2 commands have no effect.

betterdisplay set -displayWithFocus -filterUnsharpMask=50% -filterSharpenLuminance=10% -suspendColorAdjustments=off -suspendImageAdjustments=off

(with betterdisplay being an alias to the .app/Contents/MacOS executable)

🙏