Keyboard backlight
Any vendor
You can control your computer keyboard backlight via the D-Bus interface. The benefits of using it are that no modification to device files is required and it is vendor agnostic.
Here is an example implementation in Python 3.
Place the following script in /usr/local/bin/
and make it executable.
You can then map your keyboard shortcuts to run /usr/local/bin/kb-light.py +
and /usr/local/bin/kb-light.py -
to increase and decrease your keyboard
backlight level.
/usr/local/bin/kb-light.py
#!/usr/bin/env python3 # coding: utf-8 from sys import argv import dbus def kb_light_set(delta): bus = dbus.SystemBus() kbd_backlight_proxy = bus.get_object('org.freedesktop.UPower', '/org/freedesktop/UPower/KbdBacklight') kbd_backlight = dbus.Interface(kbd_backlight_proxy, 'org.freedesktop.UPower.KbdBacklight') current = kbd_backlight.GetBrightness() maximum = kbd_backlight.GetMaxBrightness() new = max(0, current + delta) if 0 <= new <= maximum: current = new kbd_backlight.SetBrightness(current) # Return current backlight level percentage return 100 * current / maximum if __name__ == '__main__': if len(argv[1:]) == 1: if argv[1] == "--up" or argv[1] == "+": # ./kb-light.py (+|--up) to increment print(kb_light_set(1)) elif argv[1] == "--down" or argv[1] == "-": # ./kb-light.py (-|--down) to decrement print(kb_light_set(-1)) else: print("Unknown argument:", argv[1]) else: print("Script takes exactly one argument.", len(argv[1:]), "arguments provided.")
Asus
The keyboard backlight file is usually locked out from editing. To unlock this file at bootup, you will need to create a systemd service.
/usr/lib/systemd/system/asus-kbd-backlight.service
[Unit] Description=Asus Keyboard Backlight Wants=systemd-backlight@leds:asus::kbd_backlight.service After=systemd-backlight@leds:asus::kbd_backlight.service [Service] Type=oneshot RemainAfterExit=yes ExecStart=/bin/chmod 666 /sys/class/leds/asus::kbd_backlight/brightness [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target
You are now able to use a keyboard backlight changer script. For an example, see ASUS G55VW#keyboard backlight script.