If you have used linux beyond flashing ubuntu once to try it out, then you know what a desktop environment is. They are these great graphical applications that help you interact with your computer in a intuitive and straightforward way.

- XFCE -

Desktop environments offer a lot of tools like a window manager, a notification system, or really usefull widgets like a network, volume, and bluetooth widgets.

I'm a little bit too silly so I don't use a normal desktop environment on my laptop. Why? Because last summer I needed something to distract myself with so I instaled arch. Then I jusy kept falling through the rabithole. First I used cinnamon, a pretty normal desktop environment similar to windows, but then I started using vim and really liked controlling everything without having to use my mouse, which led me to start using i3wm.

I3wm is not a desktop environment, it is just a window manager that lets you create and move windows in a convenient way by just usign keyboard shortcuts. It's similar to vim in the way that when you start everything feels weird and sluggish, but once you get the hang of it it's really confortable.

- i3wm -

The "problem" is that because of it being just a window manager it lacks a lot of important features out of the box. I had to spend one whole afternoon just to have some key widgets on my taskbar to be able to manage bluetooth, networks and volume.

- this is my task bar 😭 -

One thing that I always neglected was being able to control my screen brightness (My keyboard keys for controlling brightness don't work in i3). It's something I rarely change, and if I really wanted to change it I just logged out of i3, entered cinnamon and I just changed it from there. It was kind of inconvenient, but it worked. I just didn't want to have to tinker with the i3 config anymore because it sucks.

This morning I had to change my brightness for a moment and I decided that this had to stop. I had to do something to be able to change my brightness without much hustle, so I went into the archwiki and found brightnessctl which is a handy command that lets you manage the brightness of your devices, like your keyboard backlight, different leds you might have on your computer (for example near your on/off button), or your screen backlight.

This was just what I needed, but it had some problems: You have to remember the name of your screen backlight device, you have to remember what the correct command options are, the name is kinda long and I'm lazy, and, the worst of them, a device's brightness range feels incredibly arbitrary. For example my brightness goes from 0 to 21333, and to set my brightness with this command I have to give an exact digit.

This is the way you're supposed to change your brighness:

I'm not remembering all that, so I made a quick bash script that let me change my brightness with a percentage.

It just uses the brightnessctl command to get the current and max brightness, and then sets the brightness to the value corresponding to the percentage you entered. I also added two options to increase and decrease the brightness in 10% steps.

- usage examples -

I had some trouble because bash scripting has a peculiar sintax that kinda sucks, but it's finally done yipie. You can take a look at it on my github. The "installation" (it's just a bash script) and usage instrucions are all explained there.

I don't think anyone here will find any use of this command (I would be surprised if even someone actually reads this to be honest, so I wouldn't expect an incompetent i3 user like myself that can't change brightness like a normal person to be here). If you actually use it send me a message on twitter and we'll be messsy i3 pals :)

Thanks for reading :)