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
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:
trueorfalse;falsemeans nightlight is off,truemeans it is on
- brightness: map of
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.
If the daemon's call to xrandr fails as a result of invalid/outdated data in its in-memory displays field, the program will automatically remove the corresponding display from the list IF auto_remove_displays is set to true in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
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.
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.
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
redshift(optional)
Ubuntu: sudo apt install redshift
Arch Linux: sudo pacman -S redshift
Source: https://github.com/jonls/redshift
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/
Change redshift's adjustment mode
sed -i 's/adjustment-method=randr/adjustment-method=vidmode/' ~/.config/redshift.conf
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
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
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.
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