Is there a way to set a hotkey to change screen brightness?

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How to change the shortcut to adjust brightness?

The brightness keys on my laptop are not recognized by Ubuntu, which is a common problem for a variety of laptops, is there a way to set an arbitrary key shortcut to change brightness in Ubuntu 12.04? I looked in the Keyboard settings app under the shortcut tab, and I couldn't find one.

I am able to set brightness in the Brightness and Lock settings app, but it would be much more convenient if I could just assign a key shortcut, like Ctrl+F2 and Ctrl+F3.

score 19 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 11 '16 at 00:41

19

This is a generic way to set arbitrary brightness up/down keys on Ubuntu 12.04 using the Keyboard settings app.

sudo apt-get install xdotool

Open "Keyboard" settings app, go to Shortcut tab, click Custom Shortcut, then the little + button to add a shortcut.

name: Brightness Up
command: xdotool key XF86MonBrightnessUp

and another:

name: Brightness Down
command: xdotool key XF86MonBrightnessDown

Click where it says "Disabled" and then hit the key-combo you want, I ended up using F2 and F3.

In Ubuntu 16.04 use --clearmodifiers with the command, i.e.,

name: Brightness Up command: xdotool key --clearmodifiers XF86MonBrightnessUp

and

name: Brightness Down command: xdotool key --clearmodifiers XF86MonBrightnessDown

edited Aug 11 '16 at 00:41

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answered Aug 15 '12 at 17:54

postfuturist

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Doesn't appear to work for an Acer Aspire S3 on 12.04 with Fn+leftarrow/rightarrow. – bright-star Dec 09 '13 at 20:56
Doesn't appear to work for an out-of-box Toshiba Satellite S55-A5375 – Meredith Apr 27 '14 at 07:20
Worked for me on a Toshiba Satellite L305 laptop (which is 7 years old) – dreme Aug 26 '15 at 07:54
In Ubuntu 15.10 this only works if adding --clearmodifiers. I.e. the commands are: "xdotool key --clearmodifiers XF86MonBrightnessUp" and "xdotool key --clearmodifiers XF86MonBrightnessDown" – Kristofer Nov 28 '15 at 12:43
Worked on Acer C720 Chromebook booting with OpenSUSE – chaseadamsio Jun 07 '16 at 03:35
It works perfectly well on Ubuntu 20.04. Anyway, I noticed that it lags a little bit. What can the reason for lagging be? – bteo Aug 27 '20 at 21:08

Is there a way to set a hotkey to change screen brightness?

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