Linux

keyboard-backlight on GitHub I’ve been running the Beta MacOS (Catalina 10.5) and having unusually bad luck with it. I’ve been experiencing system hangs that leave the keyboard and mouse unresponsive. In response I’ve been booting from my Lubuntu partition most of the time, which is almost always fine with me (It’s what I’m using to type this post) One thing I’ve been frustrated by is that my keyboard backlight was not working in Lubuntu. I spent a few hours this weekend searching for a solution, but gave up on that. I then searched for the device file that controls my backlight, and wrote a quick little utility in Go that I could simply assign to the keyboard shortcuts XF86KbdBrightnessUp and XF86KbdBrightnessDown. I chose Go because it’s fast and compiles to an executable binary, so there is very little startup+execution lag. The resulting keyboard-backlight utility literally feels instantanous. If you decide to give it a try, keep in mind that it works on my Early 2015 Macbook Pro 13" Retina. The device file that keyboard-backlight is working with may be different than on your Macbook model, but it’s easy to change if yours is different, and you know what file it is.