Hey, so I’ve used ubuntu for a couple years now, but I’m completely new with arch and with sway. I’m trying to figure out how I can adjust my backlight brightness, but the labelled buttons don’t work. The computer I’m using is a Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11S. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated!
Try to check if this lines
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessDown exec brightnessctl set 5%-
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec brightnessctl set +5%
exists in your config and add those if they don’t. Also check if for some reason brightnessctl is not installed on your system with
pacman -Qi brightnessctl
They should already be set if you’re using the community edition, but better check.
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Or you may try this if the above doesnt work,
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec xbacklight -inc 10
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessDown exec xbacklight -dec 10
and if needed install xbacklight
sudo pacman -S xorg-xbacklight
Thanks for your help! After playing around with brightnessctl a bit, I realized that the buttons were changing the brightness, but it was only changing it by 5%, while I’m probably used to 10% or 20%. 
Thanks again for helping me out!
I have an HP laptop and I’ve never had any issue with the brightness keys on i3. The f keys work. I only added a kernel parameter for an error message in one of the logs. I see a number of users having to do this.