You want the RovyVon A5 G4 Keychain Flashlight. It’s 650 Lumens, super tiny, and has a good battery. There are modes, but just don’t use them. I bought 2 of them (one as a gift) back in 2019 and they’re still going strong. I’ve even used one as a headlamp for a backpacking trip with the provided hat clip and it worked perfectly.

Oh looks like you can still get Fenix e01. This is a great light though not exactly modern. 1 level of about 10 lumens, which is fine for a basic EDC regardless of the lumen mongers cringing.

Oh yes Skilhunt E3A is my current EDC. How could I have forgotten. Also a great light, shorter and nicer tint than the Fenix, though too bright IMHO (100 lumens, 1 hour runtime). You want the slate blue version which for some reason has a harder finish than the other colors. You can change the brightness by replacing an SMD resistor if you want to bother. I didn’t.

https://fenix-store.com/collections/e-series/products/fenix-e01-v2-0-aaa-flashlight

https://www.skilhunt.com/portfolio/e3a-aaa-100-lumens-pocket-edc-keychain-mini-led-flashlight/

I doubt such a thing exists, but I ordered a Sofirn SC31 which has a double button press to always turn on to max brightness or a single press to turn onto the last used brightness settings, so it’s fairly simple UI and i dont really intend to use it outside of just on/off.

now that i got used to the arkfeld combinations, going directly to low (hold) or boost (double press) is a must for me but i understand your frustration as not all torches are designed that well.

i hate one of the torches i use regularly: 3 taps to turn the side light on, followed by singular taps to switch between modes 🤦

with twist to on/off, even with 2 modes, you can treat the torch as 1 mode (maratac?)

☞ olight iMini 2 has only 1 mode

Maybe the UltraFire SK68, although it’s a little chonky for a single AA light. Their SP10 is also single mode and is a AAA light, so it’s quite small. Not terribly powerful, but given how many people have been satisfied with a dinky old Maglite Solitaire and its christmas tree light bulb, it may be plenty for your purposes anyway.

You’re right that it is actually remarkably difficult to find a modern single-AA-ish sized EDC light that hasn’t got multiple modes. It’s easy if you want to get one of those piece of shit 3xAAA “zoomies,” but they’re… well, pieces of shit.

I’m interested to see what other flashlight nerds can come up with that I haven’t thought of.

Lights with modern performance and only a single mode don’t really exist. Even lights that appear to be that almost always start out on a higher mode and throttle to a lower one. The main reason for that is that to avoid burning the user’s hand and/or having a very short battery life, the output has to be relatively low.

If your flashlight has much less output than most of its competitors, you will not sell very many flashlights (unless you’re Zebralight - normal rules don’t apply to Zebralight).

Depending on why you don’t want brightness settings, there may be some good options for you. If it’s that the lights you’ve used change brightness when you turn them on and off, almost none of the lights flashlight enthusiasts like behave that way.

Depends on what compact means to you but a good starting point would be Streamlights. They are basic and boring to most flashlight afficionados like average Toyotas are to car people. But they work.

I’d recommend looking at the Micro/Macrostream USB or Stylus Pro