Additional Granularity in Display brightness

So I was not enjoying the display in low light conditions in KDE. The last keyboard step before “off” was 5%, which was still pretty bright for when my girl was trying to sleep. The KDE systray power and brightness slider allowed me to get to 1%, which was better but still not perfect. So I went researching and found this:

Turns out, writing to /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness by doing

$ echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness

does in fact put the screen as low as it can go before off. I am adding this to my custom bin directory to either set it to 1, or to whatever command line argument is given, as:

Hope it helps you all as well.

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Thanks D.H, very helpful!

You can also turn off the display completely by writing 0 to that file. The script can be made to allow this by changing-gt (> 0) to -ge (>= 0), and then passing in 0.

Do you not have xrandr by default? I set an alias for ‘xrandr --output eDP-1 --brightness’ and so I just type ‘brightness .4’ or whatnot.

(More of an issue with the power button. I’ve started playing with the EC, but haven’t gotten it to work yet.)

On my daily driver install (EndeavourOS, plasma, X11), I can actually hit 0 brightness via hotkeys, so I didn’t need that in script. But the last step of hotkey controlled “on” was still like 5%, which is actually too bright for a fully darkened room. I was mostly wanting the script to automatically hit 1 brightness if no value was specified. But your edit to the script makes sense also.

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