Brightness in i3status

[kora24]

Hi everyone,

I installed xorg-server, xorg-xbacklight, xf86-video-intel;

then added
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec --no-startup-id "xbacklight -inc 10"
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessDown exec --no-startup-id "xbacklight -dec 10"
to the ~/.config/i3/config

The brightness keys work perfectly. The $ xbacklight -get shows whatever it should.

I am trying now to add the brightness to the i3status.conf . I suppose I need to add
order += "brightness" and
brightness { format = "..." }
but what exactly I cannot figure out.

Please advise.

Thank you!

[okraits]

Did you read the i3status mapage? i3status doesn't support displaying the monitor brightness.
But you can display the content of a file: https://man.archlinux.org/man/i3status.1#File_Contents
So you can do:

1. write a script which periodically writes the output of xbacklight -get to a temporary file
2. execute that script from your i3 config
3. configure i3status to read and display the content of that temporary file

[pflingstring]

Alternatively, one could read the brightness level directly from the kernel and skip steps 1 and 2.

[okraits]

Yes, although you might not get a nice relative value like 40 % but rather an absolute value like 7680.

[kora24]

Thank you very much!
Yes, I read the i3status mapage but thought I'd ask anyway. It's working now.
Thanks again!