1.2.0

Keyboard Backlight Limiter is now Dim Keys. Same app, same settings — the name is what changed.

Your settings carry over untouched. The brightness ceiling, the ambient sensitivity and Launch at login all belong to the app's identity rather than to its name, and that has not moved.

Dragging the new app in does not replace the old one. A renamed app lands beside its predecessor in Applications rather than on top of it, and both copies drive the same keyboard backlight — so left alone they work against each other. If the old copy is still your login item, the one that wins on the next boot is the one you are no longer looking at.

Dim Keys offers to clean that up the first time you open it. It quits the old app, moves it to the Trash — not a permanent delete — and re-points Launch at login at the new app for you. Prefer to handle it yourself? Choose Not Now and drag the old app to the Trash; the offer will not come back. Fresh installs never see any of this.

If you are updating from a notification, the banner will still say "Keyboard Backlight Limiter". It is posted by the copy already on your Mac, which predates the rename. The download is called DimKeys-1.2.0.dmg and it is the right one.

Universal, signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it opens with a double-click. 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. If the app reports that no keyboard backlight was found, please open an issue and say which macOS version you are on.

1.1.2

Quitting the app now hands your keyboard back the way it found it.

Your brightness is restored on quit. The app captures the backlight level when it starts and writes it back when it exits, instead of leaving the keys wherever its own curve happened to end. A keyboard that was already dark at launch still comes back at 50% — macOS does not resume driving the backlight once the app has touched it, and a frozen-off keyboard reads as broken.

Quitting no longer switches "adjust keyboard brightness in low light" back on. This was the real bug. The app wrote that setting to on every time it exited, regardless of how you had it set, so anyone who had deliberately turned it off got it turned back on after every quit. The app no longer touches that setting at all.

Worth knowing either way: that checkbox is never affected by the app driving your keyboard. It keeps reading "on" the whole time even though nothing is acting on it. Press F5/F6 to hand control back to macOS.

Thanks to u/handsup_dev for the suggestion that turned this up.

Universal (Apple Silicon and Intel), signed and notarized.

1.1.1

Housekeeping release. The app itself is unchanged — this exists so the published build points at the project's new home.

The repository moved to MacBook-Keyboard-Backlight-Limiter. GitHub redirects the old address, so nothing breaks today. But the update check in 1.1.0 and earlier has the old URL compiled into it, and that redirect only lasts while the vacated name stays unclaimed — so this build points at the new one directly rather than relying on it.

If you are on 1.1.0, updating is worthwhile for that reason alone; the old name is being claimed to keep anyone else from taking it.

Universal (Apple Silicon and Intel), signed and notarized.

1.1.0

Fixes the ambient light sensitivity controls going missing, and adds update notifications.

The sensitivity section could disappear entirely. The app looked for the ambient light sensor once at startup, and when it starts at login — around twenty seconds into boot, while macOS is still bringing drivers up — that check could come back empty on a Mac with a perfectly good sensor. The section vanished from the panel and the backlight stopped responding to room light for the rest of the session, until the app was restarted by hand. It now keeps looking instead of giving up after one try, and the panel grows the section back the moment the sensor appears.

Update notices now arrive as a notification. Previously the only place an update ever showed up was the version label in the panel, which you cannot reach if you have hidden the menu bar icon — or if you simply have not opened the panel in weeks, which is normal for an app like this. It now checks every six hours and tells you once per release. macOS asks for notification permission the first time there is actually something to say.

The panel is also tidier: clearer labels, and the small grey explanations under the checkboxes are gone.

Universal (Apple Silicon and Intel), signed and notarized.

1.0.5

Lowers the minimum to macOS 13.

Previous releases required macOS 26. That was a conservative choice rather than a technical limit — the app is built for macOS 13 and should run there.

Anything below macOS 26 is untested rather than unsupported. If the app cannot reach your keyboard backlight it will say so rather than misbehave. If that happens, please open an issue and mention your macOS version.

Universal (Apple Silicon and Intel), signed and notarized.

1.0.4

Update checks are now hourly instead of daily.

Previously the app checked at most once every 24 hours. After a release that meant you could open the panel repeatedly for a whole day and still be told nothing, which looked like the feature was broken. It now checks when you open the panel, at most once an hour.

Note: this fix only takes effect once you are running 1.0.4. Earlier versions keep the daily interval until they have taken this update.

Universal (Apple Silicon and Intel), signed and notarized. Requires macOS 26.

1.0.3

New menu bar icon.

The menu bar showed a stock system keyboard symbol next to the app's own icon. It now uses the app's glyph, so the two match. It adapts to light and dark menu bars automatically.

Universal (Apple Silicon and Intel), signed and notarized. Requires macOS 26.

1.0.2

Fixes update checking.

1.0.1 checked for updates only at launch. Since this app runs for weeks at a time, a long-running install would check once and then effectively never again, so it could miss releases indefinitely. It now also checks when you open the panel, still throttled to at most one check per day.

Universal (Apple Silicon and Intel), signed and notarized. Requires macOS 26.

1.0.1

Fixes two popover issues:

• Transparency. The panel opened in a washed-out, over-transparent state for the first moments after clicking the menu bar icon. The app now activates before showing the popover, and the panel's backdrop is pinned so it never renders the inactive variant.
• Dismissal. Clicking another menu bar item — Control Center, Wi-Fi, the clock — left the panel open, and only clicking the app's own icon would close it. It now closes when you click anywhere outside it or switch apps.

Universal (Apple Silicon and Intel), signed and notarized. Requires macOS 26.

1.0.0

First public release.