Workflow shall change the brightness of external monitors

[merchako]

I really appreciate all of the Alfred Workflows that you’ve made and shared with the community. This workflow is able to change the built-in screen on my Macbook and iMac, but it can't change the brightness on my third-party external monitor.

Fortunately, I know of a tool that can change the brightness of external monitors: https://github.com/Bensge/NativeDisplayBrightness (brew cask install nativedisplaybrightness). Would you have any interest in modifying alfred-brightness to also send signals to nativedisplaybrightness?

[fniephaus]

Thanks, @merchako. I haven't heard of nativedisplaybrightness yet, but it looks like it requires you to adjust your system preferences (see here). It might be hard to check that it's been correctly set up from within the workflow (people expect that a workflow just works out-of-the-box and in this case it might be necessary to suggest to update your system preferences). Hope that makes sense and please feel free to contribute to the workflow if you find a solution.

[merchako]

Hi Fabio,

Thank you for your kind response. I completely understand what you mean by working out of the box.

I wound up getting a workflow to work for, and I don’t think you’d need to change System Preferences to do it. However, I wound up installing a few things to make it work:

(1) Install Xcode command line tools, run xcode-select --install. (2) Install ddcctl,

git clone [email protected]:kfix/ddcctl.git
cd ddcctl
make; make install

(3) Inside your Workflow, I simply call ddccdl in parallel to your “Run Script” action.

/usr/local/bin/ddcctl -d 1 -b `echo $1*100 | bc

It’s working for me, but it’s beyond my expertise to know if this workflow can be encapsulated into a standalone Workflow for others to use. I just wanted you to know in case you ever get curious enough to add external monitor functionality to your Workflow.

—Alex Mercado

On Nov 8, 2018, 03:49 -0600, Fabio Niephaus [email protected], wrote:

Thanks, @merchako. I haven't heard of nativedisplaybrightness yet, but it looks like it requires you to adjust your system preferences (see here). It might be hard to check that it's been correctly set up from within the workflow (people expect that a workflow just works out-of-the-box and in this case it might be necessary to suggest to update your system preferences). Please feel free to contribute to the workflow if you find a solution. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

[fniephaus]

Hi @merchako, Thanks for the follow up and glad to hear you found a way to make it work. I will keep this issue open in case anyone wants this functionality as well. It should be possible to ship a custom build binary with the workflow, but I currently do not have enough time to work on this. Contributions are always welcome.

Best, Fabio