This is basically a workaround for a problem that I've noticed has affected laptops for <i>many</i> years --- the ability to set brightness and contrast independently, despite the fact that desktop monitors have retained both controls (and more).<p><i>One big problem with this setup is that my laptop’s backlight is either so dim that I can’t read the text in my terminal or so bright that I’m blinded by looking at websites. The problem is especially bad at night.</i><p>That suggests the contrast is insufficient. On a monitor with both controls, this means turning up the contrast while keeping brightness the same or slightly reduced.
What I'd really like is a 15" E-ink display with a good refresh rate. For coding and lookup up documentation at night or in the sun, that would be a pretty good setup.
I have a tablet/convertible that does this (Thinkpad Tablet 2) and it's the most infuriating thing. It doesn't seem possible to turn it off.
The "without Lumen" gif seems edited to make the effect worse. The brightness is reduced when switching to the terminal, and increased when switching to the editor. You can see the editor window background getting gray when it slides off the screen. If you need to be dishonest to "sell" your tool then I'm going to assume it's not very good.
I tried and it doesn't work on my MBA on El Capitan 11.6.<p>There's kind of the same thing on my TV, and it sucks balls.<p>The changes in brightness is extremely unnerving, especially for action scenes where the light intensity varies a lot. So it was the first thing I disabled.<p>So IMHO this won't work that well.
Thank you! This is a big pain point I've had for long time and didn't realize of the true cause until now. Anyone know of a Linux port? Or any plam to port it?
I strongly identify with this problem. I've used "hackervision", a chrome plugin, for years. It works pretty well.<p>hackervision inverts website's colors. I'd prefer to read white-text-on-black-background everywhere. If I start using programs that force a white background, I'd consider using lumen.
I've had several laptops with automatic brightness setting like this built into the monitor/integrated graphics driver. You could not disable it in a few of those (not even regedit it out), and it was truly the worst thing that I had ever experienced. Utterly useless, and utterly aggravating.
My partial solution to this is just to make make Chrome darker, using a plugin like Dark Reader[1]. It "inverts" the colors on the page but lowers the contrast so the page still looks pleasant.<p>That means that my terminal, Spotify, my desktop, and finally Chrome are all dark at night.<p>[1]: <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadpbcbfnmbkopoojfekhnkhdbieeh?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadp...</a>
some suggestions to deal with the issue OP is describing, using existing tools;<p>Night Mode Pro, firefox extension to invert colors of website; <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/night-mode-pro/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/night-mode-pr...</a><p>Stylish, firefox extension to apply styling on sites (make white background dark): <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/</a><p>There is more options, for other browsers too.
Article: <a href="http://www.ghacks.net/2015/05/18/turn-any-page-in-a-night-friendly-version-in-chrome-and-firefox/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ghacks.net/2015/05/18/turn-any-page-in-a-night-fr...</a>
It seemed to work at first, but now it's no longer working. I restarted the app, but still doesn't seem to work as described. I like how f.lux turns the screen close to amber color late at night, but it makes it a little difficult to read code, and raising the brightness helped, but Lumen sounded like a nice tool because I may not have to worry about manually increasing the brightness during nighttime. Oh and when it was actually working in the beginning, I tested out my two external monitors connected to my macbook, but it didn't seem to work on them. Anyway, I think the idea behind Lumen is very neat.
My "solution" looks like this:<p><pre><code> #!/bin/bash
for output in $(xrandr --current | grep -e "DVI[^\ ]*" -o)
do
xrandr --output $output --brightness $1
done
</code></pre>
Bound this script to super+(1-6) for values of 1.0-0.5 and it handles all of my brightness adjusting needs. 0.5 for "I just woke up" and 1.0 for watching movies. It obviously isn't automatic, but I personally think that's a benefit...<p>And yes, the script could be made nicer, but it works for me, which is enough.
Looks cool.<p>In a similar vein, I've benefited from using the Dark Reader plugin for Chrome: It does an excellent job for most webpages. I use it for hackernews, reddit, youtube, language learning sites, etc.<p>[<a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadpbcbfnmbkopoojfekhnkhdbieeh" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadp...</a>]
Shouldn't it just downregulate brightness and then slowly crank it back up? I could not stand anything below full brightness.<p>Giving up on the cool hacker look and changing my Emacs and Terminal to black on white is one of the best things I've done. My desktop background is pure white too.
A fortune for automatic brightness based on legibility of on screen characters with various global tunables such as average distance from screen and less than 20/20 vision, as I don't want to make per application profiles for everything I use.
> This is how Lumen was born. Lumen is a tiny menu bar app for macOS that magically sets screen brightness based on screen contents.<p>I hate it when people replace "automatic" with "magic". It's not magic.