I change the brightness quite often on my displays, trying to keep it as dim as possible for my environment as it changes throughout the day. For external displays, I fiddle with the monitor’s physical buttons and on-screen display to dial in the brightness; for the built-in display I use the brightness buttons on the keyboard. That’s how it’s meant to work, right?

I have been using the impressive Hyprland compositor on my Linux laptop for the last month or so, and it occurred to me recently that I had all the ingredients for a better setup: a setup where the laptop’s brightness keys would just change the brightness of whichever monitor I was using in that moment.

The ingredients

To change the brightness of the internal display, I use brillo because it supports smoothed brightness adjustments. This is the command I previously had bound to the brightness up key in Hyprland’s config:

# Increase the brightness 8% over 150ms
brillo -u 150000 -A 8

To increase the brightness of the external display, ddcutil is perfect as it uses DDC/CI to change the display’s paramters over I²C (magic!):

# Increase the brightness of the first external monitor by 8%
ddcutil --display=1 setvcp 10 + 8

What I really wanted to do was run the relevant command for the currently focused monitor (ie, the one where the cursor is). Here’s where Hyprland comes in:

# Get a list of monitors including focused state and ID, in JSON format
hyprctl monitors -j

The (truncated) output of this command is:

[
	{
		"id": 0,
		"name": "eDP-1", // The internal monitor
		"focused": false,
		...
	},
	{
		"id": 1,
		"name": "DP-2", // My one external monitor
		"focused": true,
        ...
	}
]

Using a bit of jq, I plucked out the ID and name of the focused monitor:

focused_name=$(hyprctl monitors -j | jq -r '.[] | select(.focused == true) | .name')
focused_id=$(hyprctl monitors -j | jq -r '.[] | select(.focused == true) | .id')

Putting it together

Now it’s just a matter of getting the current monitor and running the correct command based on its name:

#!/usr/bin/env sh

# Accept an arg '+' or '-'
direction=$1

# Get monitor info
monitor_data=$(hyprctl monitors -j)
focused_name=$(echo $monitor_data | jq -r '.[] | select(.focused == true) | .name')

if [ "$focused_name" == "eDP-1" ]; then
    # Internal display is focused -> use brillo
    if [ "$direction" == "-" ]; then
        brillo -u 150000 -U 8
    else
        brillo -u 150000 -A 8
    fi
else
    # External display is focused -> use ddcutil
    # But *which* external display?
    focused_id=$(echo $monitor_data | jq -r '.[] | select(.focused == true) | .id')
    ddcutil --display=$focused_id setvcp 10 $direction 8
fi

I named this script hypr_brightness.sh and mapped it to my brightness keys in my hyprland.conf a bit like the following:

binde = , XF86MonBrightnessDown, exec, /path/to/hypr_brightness.sh -
binde = , XF86MonBrightnessUp, exec, /path/to/hypr_brightness.sh +

Since implementing this change on my personal device, I’ve found myself confused on other laptops when the external monitor brightness does not change when I use the brightness keys. That’s just how intuitive it feels.

You can find the script at albertnis/hypr-brightness on GitHub. The version there is a bit more refined, with argument validation and some optimisations.