LinkBrightness links the brightnesses of Plugged In and On Battery together, so that if you change one, the other is also changed:
If LinkBrightness is running in its own console window (ie not with another process attached such as command prompt) then it has an icon in the system tray. You can show/hide the window by double-clicking the tray icon:
You can exit LinkBrightness by closing the window or right-clicking on the tray icon and choosing Exit from the popup menu:
LinkBrightness can run from multiple user accounts at the same time safely. If one instance is in the middle of syncing the brightness then the others will not interfere. Since Windows' power-scheme brightness settings are global it should not matter which user account LinkBrightness is running from. It can run from administrator and limited user accounts, but cannot run from the Guest account due to lack of privileges.
LinkBrightness [/hide_on_start] [/hide_on_minimize] [/verbose]
The options pretty much do what they say. The hide options only work if
LinkBrightness is running in its own console window. You can run
LinkBrightness /? to see the full details of each option.
Probably most people using this program will want to run it in the background
automatically at login. To do that open your startup folder (Type
shell:startup into the Run box (Win+R)) and create a shortcut to
LinkBrightness with the Run properties set to 'Minimized', and use command-line
option /hide_on_start (and optionally /hide_on_minimize to minimize to
tray).
Or to create a shortcut for all users put it in this folder instead:
%ProgramData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\StartUp
After having posted my question about how to link the two brightnesses together on Microsoft forum and on SuperUser and not receiving a working answer, I decided to do the work on my own.
This simple program does the following:
- Wait for "brightness changed" event.
- If the event occurs, read the Plugged In and On Battery brightnesses of current power plan.
- If the two are different, set them to the same value.
You can download the most recent successful build of master branch from https://ci.appveyor.com/api/projects/HubKing/LinkBrightness/artifacts/LinkBrightness/bin/Debug/LinkBrightness.exe?branch=master
Use any IDE. I used SharpDevelop, because it is lightweighted. The .NET level is set to 4.5, but it may also work on .NET 2.
For the EXE and the source code, MIT Licence. Simply put, it is free for home and work.