Setting Brightness To Absolute Value •

Like me most you have habit to “rage into the dark night” with backlit keyboards, f.lux or redshift and what-nots. I find the lowest brightness of the display, attained by pressing the F11 key, to be brighter than my taste.

So I checked if it’s possible to set the brightness level to some value since everything in unix is a file.

Ofcourse it is, lemme show you…

/sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight

# Mine is from intel, your's might be different 
# Interestingly it’s a symbolic link to -> 
# /sys/devices/pci../..:02.0/drm/card0/card0-eDP-1/intel_backlight/

It contains the the values related to the current display.

actual_brightness and brightness shows the current brightness level.
max_brightness gives the maximum brightness value that the display can produce(dunno if I can override that).

Now to change the brightness to absolute value you need to have root access.

$ sudo su root
# echo 10 > /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness

This will set the brightness level to 10. 0 means no back-light and 1 is the minimum brightness value (sorry, no decimals).