XBACKLIGHT(1)

📦
version 1.2.4 · 4 versions
, in alpine 3.24, arch rolling, fedora 43, fedora 44, nixos 26.05, nixpkgs unstable, opensuse-leap 16.0

💖 XBACKLIGHT(1) 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the General Commands Manual corner of the group chat, where today's main character is xbacklight — the little utility that adjusts your backlight brightness using the RandR extension. no cap. 🦋

✨ NAME ✨

xbacklight — adjust backlight brightness using RandR extension

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

xbacklight [-help] [-display display] [-get] [-set percent] [-inc percent]
           [-dec percent] [-time milliseconds] [-steps number]

🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

so like. Xbacklight is the girl who walks into the room and dims the lights to set a vibe 💅. It's used to adjust the backlight brightness where supported.

Here's the tea: it goes and finds all outputs on the X server that actually support backlight brightness control, and then it changes them all in the same way. Every single one. Together. As a unit. periodt. 👑

the flags, one by one, no skips 🫶

  • -get — prints out the current backlight brightness of each output that has this kind of control. The brightness shows up as a percentage of the maximum brightness supported. it's giving "tell me what we're working with" ✨
  • -set percent — sets each backlight brightness to the level you specify. you said what you said 💅
  • -inc percent — increases brightness by the amount specified. turn it up bestie 🔥
  • -dec percent — decreases brightness by the amount specified. cozy era activated 🌙
  • -help — prints out a summary of the usage and exits. the "what do i do here" button 🙈
  • -version — prints out the program version and exits. identity check 🎀
  • -time milliseconds — the length of time to spend fading the backlight between the old value and the new one. Default is 200. so it's not a jump scare, it's a slow reveal ✨
  • -steps number — how many steps to take while fading. Default is 20. smooth like butter, no choppy transitions here 🧚

and also, from the synopsis 🦋

  • -display display — tells it which display to talk to. like handing someone the aux cord but specifying which aux cord 😭
okay real talk for a sec: the description mentions adjusting brightness where supported — so if your hardware isn't giving, this isn't gonna manifest it. no invented features, we don't do that here. 💀

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

Xrandr(3)

🌈 AUTHORS 🌈

Keith Packard, Open Source Technology Center, Intel Corporation.

and that's the whole page, bestie! this little manual is from X Version 11, and the page itself is for xbacklight 1.2.4 — so if you're citing your sources in the group chat, you know exactly which version ate 💖✨🎀🦋🌸💅🫶

📦 where this page comes from