DDC Brightness Control

This project aims to be a simple and easy to use DDC brightness control plugin for Gnome

Features

Brightness control via panel
Adjustable keybindings for brightness controls
- Active screen detection
- By default, keybinding is alt+shift+f1/f2 for down/up on the active display
Display linking if you want to adjust all displays at once

Planned Features?

Would be nice to get this added to the system status menu at some point instead of its own dot
Support for direct i2c or better ddc controllers (not ddcutil)
You tell me

Requirements

Regardless of how you install the extension, it shells out to ddcutil to talk to your monitors, so it is a hard requirement.

sudo pacman -S ddcutil

Then add your user to the i2c group so ddcutil can talk to the bus without root, and re-login (or reboot):

sudo usermod -aG i2c $USER
reboot

Installation

Pick whichever method fits you. The store route is the easiest, building from source gives you the latest commits.

1. GNOME Extensions Store (easiest)

Head to the listing and click Install:

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/10312/ddc-brightness-controller/

Alternatively, search for "DDC Brightness Controller" in the Extensions manager app.

2. From Source (git clone)

Builds the extension locally and drops it into your user's extension dir. Requires just as the command runner, plus the same build toolchain used for development (see Development): fnm for a Node runtime (the build runs on Node via pnpm) and glib2 for glib-compile-schemas.

Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -S git just fnm glib2
fnm install
fnm use

Clone and install:

git clone https://github.com/lucasoskorep/ddc-brightness-control
cd ddc-brightness-control
just install

After installing from source, enable it (toggle in the Extensions app, or):

gnome-extensions enable ddcbrightness@lucaso.io

Re-login or restart the shell (Alt+F2 → r on X11) to pick it up.

Development

Building and debugging locally needs a few extra tools beyond the runtime requirements above:

just — the command runner
fnm — fast node version manager (the build runs on Node via pnpm)
uv — python package manager (used by the schema-analysis helper)
glib2 — provides glib-compile-schemas for compiling the settings schema

Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -S just fnm uv glib2

Set up the Node runtime with fnm (the pinned version lives in .node-version):

fnm install
fnm use

Then:

just install      # install deps + build + drop into the extension dir
just lint         # lint
just lint-fix     # auto-fix what eslint can
just live-debug   # tail gnome-shell logs while you poke at it

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