Intel BackLIght ADjuster

I don't care how terrible this looks. I don't care (anymore) how to properly do this within Xorg files or i3's config. I wrote this for myself so i can map my brightness up and down buttons to some utility I was familiar with. Also this was a neat coding "challenge".

Usage

ibliad +

Increases the brightness by 1 step.

ibliad - 

Decreases the brightness by 1 step.

ibliad +++

Increases the brightness by 3 steps.

As you can tell, it just counts how many + and - are given as arguments, and increases/decreases the brightness accordingly. A "step" is the max_brightness of your system divided by 20 (as defined in a macro).

i3

This program was specifically created so that you could this into your i3 config:

bindsym XF86MonBrightnessDown exec "ibliad -"
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec "ibliad +"

Maybe you want to do so too.

I don't know how the config of any other window manager or so works. You get the gist though.

Requirements

I only wrote this for my own notebook, so this only works on notebooks with an Intel backlight, so only if the screen brightness is managed by /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/.

• /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness exists
• /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/max_brightness exists
• max_brightness is a value more than 20
• Your user has writing permissions for /sys/.../brightness

If any of those requirements are not met, you can adjust the code and recompile it, e.g. by

• Setting the brightness and max_brightness paths properly at the start of the file
• Reducing the number of steps within the STEPS macro.
• Doing something like sudo chmod a+rw /sys/.../brightness.

Install

If you set up any peculiar things in a different way than usual, like a different compiler than gcc, or a different /bin folder or a different location for your man pages, you should adjust the Makefile first. Otherwise you are good to go.

After cloning the repository, do:

sudo make install

Uninstall

sudo make uninstall

Building for yourself

make