A lot of folks have issues getting this going on i3 for some reason. It seems different things work for different folks; if you read through some of the other solutions in the forum you are bound to find something that works for you.
Here are some relevant threads I found with a quick search:
Try this:
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec brightnessctl -c backlight set +5%
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessDown exec brightnessctl -c backlight set 5%-
Brightnessctl is in extra.
Other options are light & xorg-xbacklight which off course have their own syntax. The problem with these keys is they are hardwired in the bios, so you might not get anything to work.
Hello,
I want to be able to use XF86MonBrightnessUp and XF86MonBrightnessDown to adjust brightness levels on my laptop.
[ I am using i3wm]
I earlier had the common problem as most have here. Function keys did not work for changing brightness.
But i worked on the issue. and fixed it.
What i did there was exactly as stated here:
https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/laptop-brightness-keys-f3-f4-doesnt-work/44866/11
But here is another issue with that. I have set brightness to change in steps of 5%.
But when i use function keys to change it. The change is random. like:
For the first key press. the brightness decrea…
Change the xbacklight -inc $brightness_step -time 5 in the case statement to brightnessctl -c backlight set +5%.
Change the xbacklight -dec $brightness_step -time 5 in the case statement to brightnessctl -c backlight set 5%-.
brightnessctl is a utility that can be used to control screen brightness in Linux, and it can be used with i3 window manager. To use brightnessctl with i3, you’ll first need to install the brightnessctl package from your Linux distribution’s package manager.
Once you have brightnessctl installed, you can use it to set the screen brightness in i3 by binding it to a keyboard shortcut. For example, you can add the following lines to your i3 configuration file (~/.config/i3/config) to bind the XF86…
For me the default didn’t work out of the box with Dell Precision. Now AFK, will elaborate later
LATER:
Apparently I have also switched to brightnessctl suggested by ishaanbhimwal, which works perfectly.
For brightness control, there is a lightweight tool called brightnessctl, which is available in the community repo. If you are using i3wm, you simply have to add two keybindings that call brightnessctl. For example:
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec --no-startup-id brightnessctl -q set +5%
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessDown exec --no-startup-id brightnessctl -q 5%-
I wasn’t aware you have to mess around with X Server configuration files to enable backlight…
Indeed, it did! Awesome, thank you so much!
I needed to install brightnessctl and add those lines to ~/.config/i3/config. I chose 1% as I like to have a more fine grained tuning.
PS- I’ll change the title of the topic and mark it solved. I will create other threads for my other questions/issues.
I eventually found out an alternative to xbacklight that works for me. It’s called brightnessctl
You use it like this:
brightnessctl s 10%- to decrease the brightness
brightnessctl s 10%+ to increase the brightness
It’s just a matter of doing some testing to figure out what works in your specific setup.
For me, adding this to the config works:
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec brightnessctl -c backlight set +5%
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