Getting haikarainen light working for screen brightness on OpenSuse and EXWM
Table of Contents
I use light for managing my screen brightness in exwm, because the repo-available xbacklight fails for want of a recognizable xserver. One day my exwm just stopped finding “light” after using it for screen brightness for a year or two. When trying to re-install with the instructions on their repo, I kept getting this error:
autoreconf: running: automake --add-missing --force-missing --warnings=portability
autoreconf: no config.status: cannot re-make
The solution turned out to be to skip the autogen part of the instructions and just move on:
./autogen.sh./configure && make
sudo make install
Now light is back and my backlight is happy!
As a reference, the way I’ve set my exwm to use my regular laptop screen brightness keys to manage this is as follows in my emacs conf:
(exwm-input-set-key (kbd "<XF86MonBrightnessDown>") (lambda () (interactive) (shell-command "light -U 5; light")))
(exwm-input-set-key (kbd "<XF86MonBrightnessUp>") (lambda () (interactive) (shell-command "light -A 5; light")))
Note that the -A 5 and -U 5 is where I’m specifying that I want to change the lighting by 5% per keystroke. The final light invocation returns the current light %, which will then show in my message bar.
