awesome-wm-widgets/_widgets/brightness-widget.md

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Brightness widget

This widget represents current brightness level, depending on config parameters could be an arcchart or icon with text:

Customization

It is possible to customize widget by providing a table with all or some of the following config parameters:

Name	Default	Description
type	arc	The widget type. Could be arc or icon_and_text
program	light	The program used to control the brightness, either light, xbacklight, or brightnessctl.
step	5	Step
base	20	Base level to set brightness to on left click.
path_to_icon	/usr/share/icons/Arc/status/symbolic/display-brightness-symbolic.svg	Path to the icon
font	beautiful.font	Font name and size, like Play 12
timeout	1	How often in seconds the widget refreshes. Check the note below
tooltip	false	Display brightness level in a tooltip when the mouse cursor hovers the widget
percentage	false	Display a '%' character after the brightness level

Note: If brightness is controlled only by the widget (either by a mouse, or by a shortcut, then the timeout could be quite big, as there is no reason to synchronize the brightness level).

Installation

To choose the right program argument, first you need to check which of them works better for you.

• using xbacklight:

  Install (on Ubuntu it's available in the apt repository) it and check if it works by running:

  xbacklight -get
  

  If there is no output it means that it doesn't work, you can either try to fix it, or try to use light.

• using light command:

  Install (on Ubuntu it's available in the apt repository) from the repo: github.com/haikarainen/light and check if it works by running

  light -G
  49.18
  light -A 5
  

  If you're on Ubuntu/debian and if the brightness level doesn't change, try to do this: https://github.com/haikarainen/light/issues/113#issuecomment-632638436.

• using brightnessctl:

  On Ubuntu it is available in the apt repository. Install and check the ouptut of the following command.

  brightnessctl --list
  

Then clone this repo under ~/.config/awesome/:

git clone https://github.com/streetturtle/awesome-wm-widgets.git ~/.config/awesome/awesome-wm-widgets

Require widget at the beginning of rc.lua:

local brightness_widget = require("awesome-wm-widgets.brightness-widget.brightness")

Add the widget to the tasklist:

s.mytasklist, -- Middle widget
    { -- Right widgets
        layout = wibox.layout.fixed.horizontal,
        ...
        -- default
        brightness_widget(),
        -- or customized
        brightness_widget{
            type = 'icon_and_text',
            program = 'xbacklight',
            step = 2,        
        }
    }
    ...

Controls

In order to change brightness by shortcuts you can add them to the globalkeys table in the rc.lua:

awful.key({ modkey         }, ";", function () brightness_widget:inc() end, {description = "increase brightness", group = "custom"}),
awful.key({ modkey, "Shift"}, ";", function () brightness_widget:dec() end, {description = "decrease brightness", group = "custom"}),

On a laptop you can use XF86MonBrightnessUp and XF86MonBrightnessDown keys.