Today I discovered brightnessctl to adjust the screen brightness on my AwesomeWM machine. Its a command line utility that you can use to adjust the brightness of your screen. A command line interface like this gives you the ability to bind keys with something like xbindkeys or your window manager configuration.


sudo apt install brightnessctl
# or 
paru -S brightnessctl

Now that you have it installed you can use it to adjust the brightness of your screen, this worked particularly well for my laptop screen, I don't think this works for monitors, in my experience they are usually controlled by the built in osd.


# Increase brightness by 10%
brightnessctl set +10%
# Decrease brightness by 10%
brightnessctl set 10%-
# Set brightness to 50%
brightnessctl set 50%
# Set brightness to 100%
brightnessctl set 100%

Note

on my machine I had to use sudo to run the command, otherwise I got the following error:


Can't modify brightness: Permission denied

You should run this program with root privileges.
Alternatively, get write permissions for device files.