Ramblings of an aging IT geek
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linux

Key Lights in the Top Bar

A GNOME Shell extension for keylightd puts the lights in your top bar: toggle, brightness and colour temperature, per light or per group, no terminal required.

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keylightd launched with a CLI and a REST API, which is exactly what you want for scripts and not at all what you want when you're on a call and the light is too bright. A keyboard shortcut to a shell command is fine; reaching for a slider is better.

So keylightd now has a GNOME Shell extension. It sits in the top bar, talks to the daemon over its HTTP API, and gives you the controls you actually reach for mid-task: toggle a light or a whole group on and off, and nudge brightness and colour temperature without leaving what you're doing. It's published on extensions.gnome.org (extension 8185), so it installs like any other.

I'll be honest: I only really use GNOME when I'm not on my own machines; left to my own setup I'm more of a terminal junkie on a tiling Wayland desktop. But there's something quietly nice about a control that feels integrated, a proper top-bar applet that looks like it belongs there, rather than a keybind firing off a shell command. Native beats bolted-on, even on a desktop I barely touch. It's cheap to offer, too, since the extension is just a thin client over the same API the CLI uses, mostly buttons over a daemon that already does the hard part.

Toggle from the bar, script from the shell, both driving the same daemon. Repo and docs on GitHub.