Glissé
v1.0.0 · macOS 13+ · MIT

Edge
sliders. Brightness left · Volume right

Glide the left edge of your trackpad to dim the screen. The right edge for volume. Nothing to configure, no window, no overlay.

Install it free Source on GitHub
Drag this page's edges — go on
Left edge

Brightness, on the real backlight

Not a dark overlay and not a gamma trick. The panel is actually dimmer, and the display you see is the one macOS draws itself rather than a lookalike.

Right edge

Volume, following your output

The trackpad ticks under your finger as the value moves, driven by the actuator so it works from a background app. Headphones, speakers, whatever is current.

The activation rule

A drag only counts if it starts on the edge.

Being near an edge is not enough. The gesture has to begin inside the edge strip, and it has to be the only finger on the trackpad. A touch that starts in the middle and later wanders to the edge can never activate the slider, for its whole life.

It also stops listening for half a second after every keystroke, so typing never sets it off. Unglamorous rules, and most of the reason it feels like part of the system. This page behaves the same way — dragging from the middle does nothing.

STARTS ON EDGE STARTS IN MIDDLE
Everything it does

Twelve small
decisions.

  • Edge slidingLeft for brightness, right for volume. The sides are swappable.
  • The real system HUDThe display macOS draws, never an imitation of it.
  • Haptic ticksOff, light, medium or strong, on value progress.
  • Pause while typingFor half a second after each keystroke, gestures are refused.
  • Fine controlThe same gesture, with a much smaller change.
  • Bottom quarter onlyRestrict where a gesture may start, if you catch it by accident.
  • Modifier requirementHold or toggle Control, Option, Command, Shift or Fn.
  • Freeze the pointerThe cursor stays exactly where it was while you slide.
  • Three-finger middle clickDeliberate taps only; swipes are left to macOS.
  • External monitorsBrightness over DDC, writing VCP 0x10 with a capability probe.
  • Launch at loginRegistered properly through SMAppService.
  • Menu bar onlyOne small glyph. No dock icon, no window.
Install

Free, and open
from top to bottom.

Download Glissé DMG · macOS 13 or later

Open the DMG, drag Glissé into your Applications folder, then launch it. A slider glyph appears in the menu bar — that is the whole interface. Every build is listed on the releases page with a SHA‑256 checksum you can verify before opening it.

MIT licensed. No trial, no licence key, no account, no telemetry, no analytics, and no network code of any kind — the app makes no outbound connection, ever.

First launch: macOS will block it once

Glissé is not notarised, so the first time you open it macOS says “Glissé” was blocked to protect your Mac. That is expected, and it takes one step to allow. On macOS 15 and later, right-clicking the app no longer works — Apple removed that shortcut.

  1. Open Glissé once and click Done on the warning.
  2. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll to the Security section at the bottom.
  3. Next to “Glissé was blocked…”, click Open Anyway and authenticate.
  4. Open Glissé again. It launches from then on.

Then grant Accessibility, or you get no HUD. Glissé draws no display of its own — it asks macOS to draw the real one, and on macOS 26 and later that needs Accessibility. Sliding, brightness and volume still work without it; the on-screen display simply will not appear. Grant it in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility, named Device Control and Data Access → Accessibility on macOS 27.

Prefer the terminal? One command does the same thing:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Glissé.app"

The main feature needs no permission at all. Sliding, volume and brightness work the first time you launch it, before you have granted anything. Accessibility is asked for only to draw the system HUD and for three optional extras, and both event taps it installs are listen‑only, so they cannot swallow or alter a keystroke.

The honest part

What is not
finished yet.

  • Ad-hoc signed, not notarisedNotarising needs a paid Apple Developer account this project does not have, so macOS blocks the first launch and you have to allow it once in System Settings — see First launch. Because each release is ad-hoc signed, macOS also forgets the Accessibility permission on every upgrade, so you grant it again.
  • No App Store version, and there cannot be oneReading raw trackpad contacts, drawing the system HUD and talking to a monitor over I2C have no entitlements available. This is a program you choose to trust, and it should say so rather than implying a review vouched for it.
  • External monitor brightness is unverifiedThe DDC path is written and the reply parser follows the spec, but no second display was available to test it on.
  • Intel and Magic Trackpad are unverifiedThose code paths exist and compile. Nobody has run them on that hardware yet.

Every private system call is listed in the README with the reason no public alternative exists. If you want the reasoning rather than the app, the write-up on the missing brightness API is the long version.