srithon / BrightnessControl

XRandr wrapper that allows for easy screen-brightness adjustments independent of the backlight

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BrightnessControl

Disclaimer: Linux + Xorg Only

Build Status

BrightnessControl is a wrapper around xrandr that allows for easy adjustments of brightness.

This brightness is separate from the backlight.

It also allows for an emulation of a blue light filter / night light, which can be toggled on/off. This emulation is part of xrandr itself.

To use redshift instead of xrandr for the blue light filter, set use_redshift to true in the configuration file. More details on this will be in the Configuration section

Since version 1.4.5, BrightnessControl can smoothly fade between brightness levels. More information on brightness fading can be found in the configuration template.

Since version 1.6.0, BrightnessControl processes input asynchronously, and multiple monitors function as expected

Since version 2.0.0-alpha0, BrightnessControl supports different brightness levels per monitor

Technical Details

Since version 1.3.0, BrightnessControl uses a daemon to interface with xrandr, and client instances to interface with the daemon.

When the daemon is started, it loads the following values from disk

  • stored in ~/.cache/brightnesscontrol/persistent_state.toml
    • brightness: map of <adapter name> = [0..100]; percentage of full brightness
    • nightlight: true or false; false means nightlight is off, true means it is on

If the values cannot be parsed correctly, the daemon will instead use the default values.

After starting, the daemon stores all of these values in memory, and does not touch the files again until it receives a SIGTERM signal.

Upon receiving this signal, the daemon writes all of the new values to the filesystem and terminates.

Manually modifying these files while the daemon is running will have no effect.

Runtime

If the daemon's call to xrandr fails as a result of invalid/outdated data in its in-memory displays field, the program will automatically remove the corresponding display from the list IF auto_remove_displays is set to true in the configuration file.

When this is not enabled, each individual client message takes less time to process because the daemon does not have to wait for each xrandr call to terminate before moving onto the next one

If your display configuration is mostly static, consider disabling this option.

For users that often disconnect and reconnect monitors, two external options are the autorandr and srandrd programs.

Both programs can be used to automatically call brightness_control monitors --reconfigure-displays whenever the monitor setup changes

This is a good alternative to auto_remove_displays, which also has the advantage of working when a new monitor is connected

Instructions on how to configure these programs to work with this application will be added in the future.

Instructions on how to enable/disable auto_remove_displays are in the Installation section

Build Dependencies

NOTE: since v1.4.1, you can download pre-compiled binaries from GitHub releases. These binaries are packaged by Travis CI. If you do not want to download Rust (admittedly a pretty big dependency), you should consider downloading and using these binaries.

  1. cargo

The easiest way to install cargo is through rustup: the Rust toolchain installer.

The following command is taken directly from the cargo installation page.

It downloads the rustup installation script and pipes it into sh, which executes it directly.

$ curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

To read the script before it executes, you can redirect the output into a file by replacing | sh with > filename.sh. After reading filename.sh, you can execute it from there.

Alternatively, you can download the rustup package from your distro's (most likely) official repositories.

Ubuntu: sudo apt install rustup

Arch Linux: sudo pacman -S rustup

With rustup installed...

$ rustup toolchain install stable
$ rustup default stable

This should install cargo for you.

Runtime Dependencies

  1. xrandr

xrandr may already be installed on your computer. Type xrandr into your shell to check.

Ubuntu: sudo apt install x11-xserver-utils

Arch Linux: sudo pacman -S xorg-xrandr

  1. redshift (optional)

Ubuntu: sudo apt install redshift

Arch Linux: sudo pacman -S redshift

Source: https://github.com/jonls/redshift

Installation

From the project root

cargo install --path . --root ~/.local/

cargo will append bin/ to the end of the path that you pass in for --root, so the above command will install the executable into ~/.local/bin/

Configuring Redshift

Change redshift's adjustment mode

sed -i 's/adjustment-method=randr/adjustment-method=vidmode/' ~/.config/redshift.conf

Usage

All examples assume that the name of the executable is brightness_control and that the executable can be found in one of the directories in the PATH environmental variable

All brightness_control options have shorthands. For most of them, the first letter of the option's name acts as the shorthand.

When using shorthands, the separating space between an option and its value may be omitted. This is shown in the first example, and can be applied to any option that takes a value

To Reduce the Brightness by 10%

$ brightness_control brightness --decrement 10

or

$ brightness_control b -d10

To Increase the Brightness by 10%

$ brightness_control b --increment 10

To Increase the Brightness by 10% for the Active Monitor

$ brightness_control --active b --increment 10

To Increase the Brightness by 10% for the Monitor "eDP-1"

$ brightness_control -m eDP-1 b --increment 10

To Set the Brightness to 80%

$ brightness_control b --set 80

To Set the Brightness to 80% for All Enabled Monitors

$ brightness_control --enabled b --set 80

To Set the Brightness to 50% Without Fading

$ brightness_control b -ns80

To Terminate the Current Brightness Fade

$ brightness_control b -t

To Terminate the Current Brightness Fade for Monitor "HDMI-1"

$ brightness_control -m HDMI-1 b -t

To Terminate/Interrupt the Current Brightness Fade and Decrement the Brightness by 10%

$ brightness_control b -td10

To Toggle Night Light

$ brightness_control nightlight --toggle

To Reconfigure the Cached Display Settings

This is necessary when a new display adapter is connected

$ brightness_control m -r

To Start the Daemon

$ brightness_control daemon --start

To View the Help Menu

$ brightness_control --help

To Print Out the Current Configuration Template

$ brightness_control config --print-config-template

To Print Out the Current Brightness for All Enabled Monitors

$ brightness_control --enabled get -b

To Print Out the Current Brightness for Monitor "eDP-1"

$ brightness_control -m eDP-1 get -b

To Print Out the Currently Loaded Configuration

$ brightness_control g --configuration

To Reload the Daemon Configuration

$ brightness_control c --reload

Configuration

BrightnessControl's reads its runtime configuration from ~/.config/brightnesscontrol/config.toml If the file does not exist when the daemon is started, it automatically creates the file and writes the default configuration.

The default configuration template is stored in ~/.local/share/brightnesscontrol/config_template.toml

All available options are documented in the template

Technical Details

The daemon writes the template to disk when it is first started. To do this manually, copy the output of brightness_control c --print-default to the file.

Whenever the daemon is started, it checks to see if the configuration template is out of date. If it is, then it overwrites it with the current template.

When the daemon overwrites the template, it will indicate this through stdout. BrightnessControl will never overwrite your personal configuration, so whenever new options are added to the template, they have to be copied over manually.

You can reload the configuration without restarting the daemon by running brightness_control config --reload as shown above.

If the file cannot be parsed, the client will print out the error.

Keybinding

All of these commands can be bound to keybindings for ease-of-use.

In the future, this functionality may be integrated directly into the application, but for now this can be done with xbindkeys or other similar utilities.

An example schema is below

Alt+PgUp -> brightness_control b -i10

Alt+PgDown -> brightness_control b -d10

Alt+Ctrl+PgUp -> brightness_control b -i2

Alt+Ctrl+PgDown -> brightness_control b -d2

Alt+End -> brightness_control n -t

Alt+Home -> brightness_control m -r

About

XRandr wrapper that allows for easy screen-brightness adjustments independent of the backlight

License:GNU General Public License v3.0


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