Dumb Brightness

Very simple program to control brightness of your screen, keyboard or whatever exposed via sysfs (Linux only)

How it works?

It just reads files brightness and max_brightness (which are usually found somewhere in sysfs), and then writes calculated value back to brightness according to command line arguments. It also shows fancy Desktop Notification with progress bar if your notification server supports it.

It avoids running multiple instances of itself (via flock) and properly updates previous notification, both separately for different working directories.

Installation

Archlinux

There is an AUR package.

Install using Your Favorite AUR Helper:

your-favorite-aur-helper -S dumb-brightness-git

Build and install manually:

cd /tmp/
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/dumb-brightness-git.git
cd dumb-brightness-git/
makepkg
sudo pacman -U ./dumb-brightness-git-*.pkg.tar.*

Usage

Basic usage

cd /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight
dumb-brightness --increase 10
dumb-brightness --decrease 10

Instead of changing current working directory, you can specify it with -w, --working-directory argument:

dumb-brightness -w /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight --increase 10
dumb-brightness -w /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight --decrease 10

More features: notification icon, title, duration and smooth transition:

dumb-brightness -w /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight --icon display-brightness-symbolic --decrease 10 --steps 10 --step-interval 10 --title 'Screen Brightness' --duration 1.5
dumb-brightness -w /sys/devices/platform/applesmc.768/leds/smc::kbd_backlight --icon keyboard-brightness-symbolic --increase 10 --steps 10 --step-interval 10 --title 'Keyboard Brightness'

Using with Sway (it should work with i3 too):

(real world example for MacBook Pro 2015)

bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec --no-startup-id "dumb-brightness -w /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight --increase 10 --steps 10 --step-interval 10 --icon display-brightness-symbolic --title 'Screen Brightness'"
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessDown exec --no-startup-id "dumb-brightness -w /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight --decrease 10 --steps 10 --step-interval 10 --icon display-brightness-symbolic --title 'Screen Brightness'"
bindsym XF86KbdBrightnessUp exec --no-startup-id "dumb-brightness -w /sys/devices/platform/applesmc.768/leds/smc::kbd_backlight --increase 10 --steps 10 --step-interval 10 --icon keyboard-brightness-symbolic --title 'Keyboard Brightness'"
bindsym XF86KbdBrightnessDown exec --no-startup-id "dumb-brightness -w /sys/devices/platform/applesmc.768/leds/smc::kbd_backlight --decrease 10 --steps 10 --step-interval 10 --icon keyboard-brightness-symbolic --title 'Keyboard Brightness'"