The brightness blank is the volume blank's sibling for your screen. Type brightness _ and the _ fills with the current screen brightness as a percentage; Ctrl+Alt+↑/↓ then steps the real backlight by 10 per press.
What you type
The trigger keyword is brightness, leading the sentence your _ ends. Like volume, the keyword stays in your buffer after the fill (the frontmatter's comment is explicit: a bare 70% is context-free, and keeping the prefix lets readers tell volume, battery, and brightness apart).
Where the value comes from
A colocated brightness-blank.sh script with a per-platform ladder:
- Windows (WSL): a colocated
BrightCtl.exe(compiled from shipped C# source byopencues seed-configs), with a legacy PowerShell fallback. - macOS: the
brightnesstool (brew install brightness) for built-in laptop displays; external displays needddcutil, which is rare on macOS. - Linux:
brightnessctlfor laptop backlights (via/sys/class/backlight), thenddcutilfor external DDC/CI monitors.
Cycling writes back
It declares blankStep: 10, so cycling is a genuine hardware control: each press calls the script's set branch and your screen visibly changes. Like volume, it's a genuine two-way system control rather than a lookup. Voice mode (speak: true) reads the value aloud on navigation if you have TTS enabled.
Two honest caveats, both documented in the shipped files: the script runs with sandbox: off because backlight controls live outside the config root, and on a machine with no recognised backend the get branch echoes a placeholder 50 so the runtime always has a value to splice. On macOS, the brightness tool is a one-time brew install rather than a built-in.
Related: The volume blank · Control your system from text · Write your own blank · GitHub repo