SelfMadeSystem / system76-keyboard-rainbow

System76 Rainbow Keyboard

This is a simple program to have a rainbow keyboard on System76 laptops. It should work on any System76 laptop with a backlit keyboard. Please report any issues you have with it.

Tested on a System76 Gazelle (gaze18) laptop running Pop!_OS 22.04.

The brightness should already be set to what it was before running the program when it exits. It should also automatically adjust when you change the brightness with the keyboard. If it doesn't, please report it as an issue.

Video

Here's a video of me using it. It looks better in person. You also can't really see the brightness change, but it's very evident when you're actually using it. Furthermore, it does reset to how your brightness/color was before you started the program.

VID_20230923_211147.mp4

Installation

You must install rust and cargo to build this program. You can install them with apt:

sudo apt install rustc cargo

Then you can build and install the program with:

cargo install --git https://github.com/SelfMadeSystem/system76-keyboard-rainbow

To run the program, you need to add ~/.cargo/bin to your PATH:

If using bash:

export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.cargo/bin"

If using fish:

set -gx PATH $PATH $HOME/.cargo/bin

Usage

The program must be run as root to access the following files:

• /sys/class/leds/system76_acpi::kbd_backlight/color
• /sys/class/leds/system76_acpi::kbd_backlight/brightness

If you don't want to run the program as root, you can change the permissions of these files. I run it as root because I'm lazy. You can probably figure out how to do this yourself.

You can run the program with:

system76-keyboard-rainbow

You can also run it in the background with:

system76-keyboard-rainbow &

Options

You can change the sleep time of the rainbow with the -s or --sleep-time option (in milliseconds). For example, to have a 0.1 second sleep time:

system76-keyboard-rainbow -s 100

You can also change the color increment with the -c or --color-increment option. For example, to have a 10 increment:

system76-keyboard-rainbow -c 10

What's the keyboard_led_rainbow.sh file?

That's the original script I wrote to do this. It took up to 10% of my CPU when running, so I decided to rewrite it in Rust. I'm keeping it here for posterity.

License

This program is licensed under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more information.