today in "huh, they built it with THAT?"
Asus ProArt ChromaTune. It's a little app that sits in your windows tray and can switch between your monitor's color palettes. You can either do it manually, or you can tell it to automatically switch when you run certain programs, so you can do things like "always use sRGB mode when I'm in photoshop".

Wanna guess how they built this?

Here's a hint: I opened ui/html/colorspaces.html

yep it's electron. The monitor utility is a webpage. why not

welcome to 2026 where it's normal for your monitor control app to be implemented as half a million characters of javascript

it's jquery/jquery ui and some yahoo dom stuff, not react, at least

so the program is by Portrait Displays, Inc. with a copyright date of 1993-2023.

And I was wrong. It's not electron. It's worse.

they wrote the app in C++
in MFC
so they're using some embedded COM HTML view

this isn't Electron, it's a DIY Electron clone

anyway the reason I was hacking this is that I want to know how it communicates with my monitor, so I can do it myself instead of using their weird abomination of an app.

Answer seems to be SetVCPFeature & GetVCPFeatureAndVCPFeatureReply from the DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) API

fun fact: did you know you can call a win32 API to degauss a monitor?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/highlevelmonitorconfigurationapi/nf-highlevelmonitorconfigurationapi-degaussmonitor

I have no idea what monitor ever supported both DDC and software-triggered degaussing. I'm guessing the answer is "not any monitor you could ever afford"

yet another day of "are they intentionally developing this shit with anti-debugging features or is it just a side effect of their frankly insane software stack"

when you run AsusChromaTune.exe, it calculates a command argument to run AsusChromaTune.exe with, then runs that and quits

so I was having trouble figuring out where it did this: and the simple answer as to why is that it's not.

I had missed that the program wasn't closing, and instead of launching a new copy of itself, it was telling the existing copy to come to front and then exiting.
whoops