Changing X brightness and gamma with xrandr (Shallow Thoughts)

Changing X brightness and gamma with xrandr

I switched a few weeks ago from unstable ("Sid") to testing ("Stretch") in the hope that my system, particularly X, would break less often. The very next day, I updated and discovered I couldn't use my system at night any more, because the program I use to reduce the screen brightness by tweaking X gamma no longer worked. Neither did other related programs, such as xgamma and xcalib.

The Dell monitor I use doesn't have reasonable hardware brightness controls: strangely, the brightness button works when the monitor is connected over VGA, but if I want to use the sharper HDMI connection, brightness adjustment no longer works. So I depend on software brightness adjustment in order to use my computer at night when the room is dim.

Fortunately, it turns out there's a workaround. xrandr has options for both brightness and gamma:

xrandr --output HDMI1 --brightness .5
xrandr --output HDMI1 --gamma .5:.5:.5

I've always put xbrightness on a key, so I can use a function key to adjust brightness interactively up and down according to conditions. So a command that sets brightness to .5 or .8 isn't what I need; I need to get the current brightness and set it a little brighter or a little dimmer. xrandr doesn't offer that, so I needed to script it.

You can get the current brightness with

xrandr --verbose | grep -i brightness

But I was hoping there would be a more straightforward way to get brightness from a program. I looked into Python bindings for xrandr; there are some, but with no documentation and no examples. After an hour of fiddling around, I concluded that I could waste the rest of the day poring through the source code and trying things hoping something would work; or I could spend fifteen minutes using subprocess.call() to wrap the command-line xrandr.

So subprocesses it was. It made for a nice short script, much simpler than the old xbrightness C program that used <X11/extensions/xf86vmode.h> and XF86VidModeGetGammaRampSize(): xbright on github.