enlighten

Enlighten is a very small C utility to control the backlight brightness in Linux.

Features

• Leverage backlight sysfs interfaces!
• Set brightness to a particular level!
• Retrieve current brightness level!
• Increase and Decrease brightness level relative to the current level!
• Use percentage of maximum brightness or absolute steps!
• Specify backlight device in an environment variable!
• Specify a list of directories to search for candidate devices in an environment variable!
• Specify minimum and maximum thresholds in environment variables!
• Specify smooth transition settings in environment variables!
• List all relevent environment configuration at runtime!

Non-Features

• No auto-dimming
• No brightness level save/restore (note, systemd supports this)
• Cannot order pizzas
• Cannot read mail (yet)

Install

Manual installation: :

./configure --device=<device>
make
sudo make install

Replace <device> with the name of your backlight device. It should be listed in /sys/class/backlight. Intel graphics for example calls the device intel_backlight.

Packages

If you would like to package enlighten, please feel free to contact me and I will be happy to help, include the source files for the packaging, and list the official link here:

• Arch Linux (AUR)

Run as regular user

Given that you have installed and loaded the prepackaged backlight udev rule, or that you have manually changed the group permissions on the brightness file of your device. Add your user to the video group to run enlighten as a regular user:

usermod -a -G video <username>

Usage

For usage information type enlighten help