# Is there a way to tie backlight control into a GUI power manager?



## dlrobin874 (Nov 1, 2021)

I have a Thinkpad T530, using FreeBSD 13. I have backlight control working (acpi_ibm and acpi_video) in the sense that I can register brightness key presses and control the backlight from sysctl, and with a little shell glue I can tie those together.

What I am curious is if there's a way to get the keypresses to register in a GUI and have control from the GUI so you can get the OSD pop up, use the slider on the panel to set brightness, etc.

I'm thinking the answer is "no" since I booted up a live USB of GhostBSD and it didn't work like that (just the keys directly control the hardware but the DE is unaware). Plus I've read the source for xfce4-power-manager and KDE PowerDevil (trying to solve a different issue on Linux) and they seem on a cursory reading to expect a Linux-style /sys/class/backlight/* to work.

But figured I'd ask anyway in case there's something I don't know because I'm new to BSD.


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## Geezer (Nov 2, 2021)

dlrobin874 said:


> I'm thinking the answer is "no" since I booted up a live USB of GhostBSD



This is Freebsd, and the answer is yes ... probably. It depends on your DE. I am using xfce, which allows you to assign commands to key-press combinations. So you can assign `sysctl` for the specific values that you want and assign it to a keystroke.

Additionally, you can make your own icons in the panel to control the screen brightness. This is what I have done on my lenovo laptop.


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