How to Change Mac’s Volume/Brightness Control Overlay HUD – Over all the design changes that Apple has ever completed, the brightness/volume control overlay has proceeded with all the way. Apple’s volume/brightness control overlay on its devices is prominent, gets in the way of your work process and is a major diversion particularly when you’re watching a movie. A fast search on StackOverflow reveals many people ranging on how to change the overlay to something minimal or even totally disable it. While there are a lot of considerable measure that change the overlay to something non-obtrusive on the iPhone.

To change Mac’s Volume/brightness control overlay in 2 easy steps.

1. Disable System Integrity Protection (SIP)
2. Install mySIMBL

Note:

This method works on the latest macOS Sierra 10.12, and it should be backwards compatible all the way up to OS X macOS 10.9.

1. Disable System Integrity Protection (SIP)

Note: SIP was introduced in 10.11 El Capitan, so if we running an older version of macOS, we must skip this step. Additionally, please remember that disabling SIP could possibly allow malicious software to modify system files. It is suggested to turn on SIP as soon as you’re done with this entire process.

To disable System Integrity Protection on macOS running 10.11 El Capitan or newer

• Click on  menu —> “Restart…”

• Hold the CMD+Rbutton on your keyboard until you boot into the recovery OS. Booting into the recovery may take a little longer than your regular boot up.
• Click on “Utilities” —> “Terminal” from the menu bar on the top.

• Enter the command “csrutil disable; reboot” (without the quotes).

This should disable SIP and your Mac should restart automatically.

2.Install mySIMBL

mySIMBL is a tool that inject third-party code into applications developed for Mac. It is a one-stop place for managing SIMBL plugin-ins and tuning your Mac without getting your coding part.

• Open mySIMBL, navigate to the “Discover”tab on the left and click on “Wolf’s plugins“.

• Navigate to “cleanHUD” —> “Install“.

Once you’ve installed the cleanHUD plugin for mySIMBL, just restart your Mac. After the boot-up, try pressing the volume/brightness keys on your Mac’s keyboard and minimalistic control overlay centered on the menu bar on the top. It doesn’t get in the middle of your way while you’re working on something and appears lots high-quality than Apple’s default implementation.

CleanHUD works fine, but it has its own share of issues. For example, you are not able to get it to work on full-screen apps. It also randomly makes a decision not to show up the brightness/volume bar sometimes. Fortunately, you can always change the volume/brightness regardless of whether it displays the control overlay HUD or not.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How to revert to Apple’s default volume/brightness volume overlay?

Open mySIMBL and navigate to “Discover” tab on the left. Click on “Wolf’s plugins” —> “cleanHUD” —> “Remove“. Restart your Mac.

How to re-enable System Integration Protection?

Follow the procedures from Step 1, but just change the command to “csrutil enable; reboot” (without the quotes).

My Mac defaults to Apple’s control overlay after every Reboot

Open mySIMBL, click on “Preferences” and ensure that “Run helper at login” box is checked. If you still see Apple’s default control overlay every time, it doesn’t work with your Mac. Your best would file an error report with the developer.

How to uninstall mySIMBL completely?

Open mySIMBL and navigate to “SIMBL” —> “Uninstall SIMBL“.