Autokey - Adjusting Screen Brightness with Hotkeys (and sustaining that brightness in Awesome Window Manager)

Don't know the direct answer, but here's a workaround.

Store the desired screen brightness value in a parameter file with a suitable default value for the first time it runs.

Write a daemon script (in bash or in your language of choice) that is launched at login. Most Desktop environments have an autostart facility to run such scripts for you. (KDE and Gnome both have this feature. I don't know about AWM.)

This script will loop forever in the background with a suitable delay in each iteration to keep its resource usage low.

In each iteration, the script will read the current screen brightness and compare it to the value in the file. If they're not the same it will adjust the brightness up or down appropriately.

Modify your AutoKey scripts to use/modify the value in the file instead of using the AutoKey global stored variable.

Your script should detect when the screen is off and do nothing so it doesn't inadvertently turn the screen on.

If you want to, you can also add something your script looks for (e.g. another file or another value in its parameter file). If this is not present or true, the script will terminate. You may also want something like this so your script doesn't interfere with special screen brightness settings which might be applied by power management when your battery is low or very low.

It's probably easier though just to use pkill to get rid of it when desired.

Below, is a script that creates a systemd service that sustains the screen brightness level after resuming from suspend.

I created a folder called "scripts" in my home folder. Then I created a file called "SetupSustainBrightnessService.sh", with these contents:

# Create directory called "scripts" in home folder: mkdir ~/scripts #Go to that folder cd ~scripts # Create a file to store a default brightness of 50 echo "50" > default_brightness # Use nano to save the script into a file: nano SetupSustainBrightnessService.sh 

Save the text below into the file:

#!/bin/bash # Directory to store the brightness setting script script_dir="$HOME/scripts" # Create the script directory if it doesn't exist mkdir -p $script_dir # Create the set-brightness.sh script cat <<EOL > $script_dir/set-brightness.sh #!/bin/bash brightness=\$(cat ~/scripts/default_brightness) # Replace with where you store your brightness setting brightnessctl set \$brightness EOL # Make the script executable chmod +x $script_dir/set-brightness.sh # Create the systemd service file sudo bash -c "cat <<EOL > /etc/systemd/system/set-brightness.service [Unit] Description=Set brightness after resume After=suspend.target [Service] Type=simple ExecStart=$script_dir/set-brightness.sh [Install] WantedBy=suspend.target EOL" # Reload systemd, enable and start the service sudo systemctl daemon-reload sudo systemctl enable set-brightness.service sudo systemctl start set-brightness.service echo "Brightness restore script and systemd service have been set up." 

Run the Script

# Navigate to the scripts folder cd ~/scripts # Make script above executable chmod +x SetupSustainBrightnessService.sh # Run the script ./SetupSustainBrightnessService.sh 

Output from running the script:

Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/suspend.target.wants/set-brightness.service → /etc/systemd/system/set-brightness.service. Brightness restore script and systemd service have been set up. 

Now, when resuming from suspend, systemD runs this script, which sustains previous brightness: setup-brightness-restore.sh

Set default brightness with a value between 1 and 100 in this file: nano ~/scripts/default_brightness