Technology Tales

Adventures in consumer and enterprise technology

Changing monitor brightness using the Linux command line

Published on 11^th August 2018 Estimated Reading Time: 1 minute

Recently, I needed to reduce my monitor brightness but could not make the hardware buttons work. Thus, I considered alternatives and discovered the xrandr command was effective. First, I needed to identify my display name, so I executed the following command with the -q query switch to retrieve this information:

xrandr -q | grep " connected"

The output from this looked like this:

DVI-D-0 connected primary 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 521mm x 293mm

My device name appeared as the first block of characters in the above, so I plugged that into the second command below to achieve the desired adjustment.

xrandr --output DVI-D-0 --brightness 0.9

Any value between 0.0 and 1.0 is acceptable, but I went with 0.9 for 90% brightness. The required dimming and brightening then is only a command away.

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