set-light

Minimal backlight manager initially developed as a replacement for light after it became officially abandoned. It's a simple shell script with only basic options. It also supports a minimum (as well as maximum) threshold and both relative and absolute brightness values.

Install

git clone https://github.com/cherrynoize/set-light
cd set-light
make install

The makefile adds us to the video group so we can write to the file without root privileges. It also creates, enables and starts the [set-brightness-rules.service](set-brightness-rules.service) systemd service to set the group and permissions for the backlight and leds brightness files.

This substitutes the udev rules which caused the chgrp and chmod commands to be triggered randomly many times and clutter the journal as well.

Do not run make install as root or it will not add the correct user to the group. sudo is used in the makefile instead.

Configuration

You can edit the default step for brightness change, the threshold values and path to the backlight device in the source file. Useful variables can be found at the top of the script.

Usage

Usage:
  set-light [OPTION] [VALUE]

Description:
  Sets backlight brightness value. Add \`r\` to use percentage
  (relative) values rather than absolute. \`a\` means absolute
  and is the default value.

  set-light only supports a single option before VALUE. Do not
  separate command line arguments into multiple options.

  Returns current brightness if called with no value argument.

Options:
  -m               set minimum value
  -M               set maximum value
  -d[r|a] VALUE    decrease by VALUE
  -u[r|a] VALUE    increase by VALUE
  -[s][r|a] VALUE  set VALUE (default option)
  -v | --version   print version
  -h | --help      show this help message

Examples:
  # get current backlight percentage
  set-light -r
  # set maximum brightness
  set-light -M
  # decrease brightness by 15
  set-light -d 15
  # increase brightness by 5%
  set-light -ur 5
  # set brightness to half
  set-light -r 50

WM integration

awesome

If you want a backlight widget for awesome that also supports set-light check out Ctrl.

sxhkd

sxhkd keybindings for bspwm or any other wm for that matter.

# brightness set value
super + u; {0-9}; l
    set-light -r {0-9}
super + u; {0-9}; {0-9}; l
    set-light -r {0-9}{0-9}

# brightness down/up
XF86MonBrightness{Down,Up}
    set-light -{dr,ur} 7

# brightness min/max
super + XF86MonBrightness{Down,Up}
    set-light -{m,M}

Contribution

Please open a PR or an issue for any bugs or whatever.

cherrynoize / set-light