Keyboard shortcuts to control monitor brightness in Mac OS X

August 15, 2007 8:28 AM

How might one go about creating a shortcut to controlling monitor brightness with a Mac Powerbook running Tiger (this problem also existed in 10.3) for a Keyspan remote?

Simple, right, push the monitor brightness key on the keyboard. Yes, that works -- but I'd like to be able to control the LCD screen's brightness on my Keyspan remote control. One way to do that would be to create a keyboard shortcut in that software to do that. But while the brightness keys are shared with the function keys, there's no way in the Keyspan software to affect the function keys' alternate uses (volume, brightness, Dashboard, etc.) Volume has other work arounds, does anyone know of something similar for the screen brightness?

posted by kenneth to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Maybe LightMe 2.0 is what you're looking for?
posted by odinsdream at 8:49 AM on August 15, 2007

I'd think there should be a way to control brightness from the terminal so that might be something to look into.
posted by 6550 at 8:52 AM on August 15, 2007

If you've a little experience with C code, you could slightly modify the "display-brightness.c" command-line program at the bottom of this page on Mac light hacking. Perhaps instead of having it take a value from 0.0 - 1.0 for brightness, it takes an "up" or "down" argument that increases or decreases the current brightness by some ratio. Then you could trigger that program using the Launch option in KeyspanDMR. That's a pretty hardcore geeky solution though.
posted by todbot at 9:05 AM on August 15, 2007