A one-click menu bar switch for the Logitech Litra Glow. No Logitech Options+ required.
If you bought a Litra Glow and just want to turn it on and off without running Logitech's software in the background, this is for you.
The Litra Glow is a great little light with one annoying catch: out of the box, software control means installing Logitech Options+, a heavyweight always-running app, just to click one button. The light itself speaks plain USB HID and doesn't need any of that.
A tiny native Swift app (one source file, zero dependencies, talks USB HID directly) that lives in your menu bar:
- Left-click the bulb to toggle the light on or off instantly
- Right-click for the controls:
- Brightness slider
- Color temperature slider (2700K to 6500K)
- One-click presets: Warm, Neutral, Daylight, Cool
- Launch at Login
- Check for Updates (compares against the latest GitHub release)
- The bulb icon fills in when the light is on, so you can see state at a glance
- No Dock icon, no background bloat, next to zero CPU
GlowBar talks to the light directly over USB. No CLI, no Homebrew, no drivers, nothing else to install.
Grab GlowBar.app.zip from the latest release, unzip, and drag GlowBar.app to /Applications. The app is ad-hoc signed (not notarized), so on first launch right-click it and choose Open, or clear quarantine with:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/GlowBar.appYou'll need the Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install if you don't have them). Then:
git clone https://github.com/drewburchfield/glowbar.git
cd glowbar
./build.sh
cp -R build/GlowBar.app /Applications/
open /Applications/GlowBar.appThat's it. Look for the bulb in your menu bar.
GlowBar is a single-file AppKit app (src/main.swift) with a built-in IOKit HID driver for the Litra protocol: each command is a 20-byte USB HID report, and reads are a query report followed by a reply. State is polled every 15 seconds and refreshed on every interaction, so the icon stays accurate even if you change the light some other way (physical button, another tool).
Works with the Litra Glow (tested). The Litra Beam and Beam LX speak the same protocol and are detected with their correct brightness ranges, but I've only tested the Glow.
- The bulb icon isn't in my menu bar. On MacBooks with a notch, macOS hides status items that don't fit when the menu bar is crowded. GlowBar is still running; free up space by removing another status item, or use an external display. The icon comes back on its own.
- The menu says the light isn't answering. The light is connected but not responding to commands. Unplug the Litra's USB cable, plug it back in, and hit Check Again.
- "No Litra device found" but it's plugged in. Try a different USB port or cable, and make sure nothing like Logitech G HUB is holding the device exclusively.
- The HID protocol implementation is ported from timrogers/litra-rs (MIT), which did the real reverse-engineering work. GlowBar is a friendly native button on top of that knowledge.
MIT