How can I dim the screen from Terminal?

Question

Is it possible to dim the screen from Terminal, in a Mac with OS X Lion? Is there any command to do control brightness and volume?

score 25 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:45

25

You can install this command line tool from github.com/nriley/brightness. The install is pretty easy if you have homebrew:

brew install brightness

And usage is straightforward:

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:45

Community

answered Apr 11 '14 at 16:19

studgeek

For me, these instructions installed a command called brightness, not screenbrightness. Otherwise, this worked as described. Thanks! – octern Oct 10 '15 at 12:42
I think it have to do with a github merge of projects. When that happened they updated the command to brightness (which someone in Community happily already fixed in the answer). – studgeek Jul 02 '17 at 23:07
Note that the brightness Homebrew package is currently broken under macOS 10.13. See https://github.com/nriley/brightness/issues/21. – Taylor D. Edmiston Sep 12 '18 at 15:38
Does work for my external LG Ultrafine™ 5K, but I think that's an exception as it implements extra APIs – ijoseph May 30 '22 at 03:46

score 20 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 10 '19 at 12:59

20

You can do it via an Applescript and run it as such:

Dimmer:

tell application "System Events"
        key code 144
end tell

Brighter:

tell application "System Events"
        key code 145
end tell

You can save these as .script files and then run them from the CLI like this:

osascript ~/Path/to/File

You can also do it this way, but that requires more setup.

edited Oct 10 '19 at 12:59

Community

answered Dec 28 '11 at 22:11

daviesgeek

Not working on Mac OS X 10.12.6. – politicus Jan 29 '19 at 09:50
This doesn't work for me on MacOS 10.14. – Trevor Sullivan Aug 30 '19 at 20:39
2

The key codes should be 144 and 145, respectively. See http://osxdaily.com/2019/08/14/change-screen-brightness-mac-terminal/ – Sining Liu Oct 10 '19 at 10:33

score 9 · Answer 3 · edited Jul 13 '15 at 19:37

9

screenshot

I've created a node module for this that supports setting the brightness using the CLI. See https://github.com/kevva/brightness-cli.

npm install --global brightness-cli

And then simply just run brightness from your command line.

edited Jul 13 '15 at 19:37

Sindre Sorhus

answered Jul 13 '15 at 18:31

kevva

Doesn't work for me: `$ brightness 100
/usr/local/lib/node_modules/brightness-cli/cli.js:3 const brightness = require('brightness'); ^^^^^ SyntaxError: Use of const in strict mode. at Module._compile (module.js:439:25) at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:474:10) at Module.load (module.js:356:32) at Function.Module._load (module.js:312:12) at Function.Module.runMain (module.js:497:10) at startup (node.js:119:16) at node.js:902:3`
– Kibber Jun 23 '16 at 21:29
work for me but it does not tell at system level – Shahid Ghafoor Nov 10 '18 at 11:08

3 Answers3