brightd(1)

🌸 NAME 🌸

brightd — a brightness control daemon, bestie. she watches your screen so your eyes don't have to 💅

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

brightd [-v] [-d] [-P <file>] [-u n] [-e n] [-w n] [-b s] [-f] [-c n]
[-x] [-r n]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so picture this: brightd is a daemon that dynamically dims your LCD when you're not using your pc. like, you walk away, she notices, she fades the screen down. iconic behaviour, honestly. the whole idea is adapted from iBooks 🍓

💖 OPTIONS 💖

• -v — spill some debugging tea ☕. heads up tho: this will not work in daemon mode.
• -d — makes brightd fork itself into the background. bestie, you want this one ;)
• -P <file> — sets where the pid file lives in daemon mode. default is /var/run/brightd.pid.
• -u n — brightd will drop privileges after opening all the file descriptors. with this you get to pick which user to change to 👑

you have to start brightd as root — or at least as a user who can access X11-Sessions and /dev/input/event. no cap.

• -e n — filter which event sources get used, by POSIX extended regexp n. for example, on intel platforms use "i8042.+event" to avoid having HDAPS taken into account. you're supposed to include "event" in there, but you're not required to. your call 💅
• -w n — how many seconds of inactivity to wait before the brightness starts going down. the patience window ⏳
• -b n — dark screen brightness. never reduce brightness below this value. and heads up: you won't be able to change brightness manually below this value either. it's a hard floor, periodt.
• -f — reduce brightness even if you're already on the highest brightness level. by default brightd won't do this, and that's on purpose — it means you can temporarily disable her while you're reading through a text or whatever 📖. and if you specify this option twice, brightd will also reduce brightness when you're on AC.
• -c s — set the backlight class to use. you may specify any subdirectory of /sys/class/backlight 🌈
• -x — don't query X11 for inactivity / deactivated screensavers. she minds her own business ✨
• -r n — brightd will create a FIFO named n (deleting the file if it existed before! 😭) and read from it. if you tell your acpid to write brightness levels to that FIFO whenever the user changes brightness, brightd can help you with some stuff: for example, if brightd faded to brightness 0 and you then increase brightness, brightd would automatically fade back up to the highest level. the way that works is lowkey genius 🫶

🎀 FILES 🎀

/usr/bin/brightd
/sys/class/backlight/*/*

👑 AUTHORS 👑

• Phillip Berndt (mail at pberndt dot com)
• Richard Weinberger (richard at nod dot at)
• Hannes von Haugwitz (hannes at vonhaugwitz dot com)

and that's the whole page, bestie 💜 this was brightd(1), brightd manual, version 0.4.1, dated 18 October 2008 — vintage but still slaying ✨ go dim those screens responsibly 🎀