hyprgamma

Per-monitor brightness, contrast, and gamma control for Hyprland — with a companion GTK4 GUI for live tweaking.

hyprgamma applies a software color ramp to each output through Hyprland's gamma LUT, letting you set brightness, contrast, and per-channel gamma independently for every monitor. Settings are saved to disk and re-applied automatically on startup and on monitor hotplug.

It's handy when:

• one of your monitors is dimmer or warmer than the others and you want them to match,
• your panel has no usable hardware brightness control (most desktop displays),
• you want a quick contrast/gamma curve without an ICC profile or redshift-style tool.

• Demo
• Requirements
• Install (hyprpm)
• Manual build
• Usage
  • hyprctl commands
  • Keybinds
  • The GTK4 GUI
• Configuration file
• How it works
• Troubleshooting
• Uninstall
• License

Screenshot / GIF of the GUI goes here. Drop an image at assets/gui.png and it will render below:

• Hyprland 0.55.x (the plugin is ABI-locked to the Hyprland it was built against — see Troubleshooting)
• hyprpm (ships with Hyprland) for the easy install path
• For a manual build: cmake (≥ 3.19), a C++23 compiler, the Hyprland headers, and nlohmann_json
• For the optional GUI: gtk4 and json-glib

On Arch:

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel cmake nlohmann-json gtk4 json-glib

This is the recommended path — hyprpm builds the plugin against your exact Hyprland version, so it stays in sync across updates.

# add and build the plugin repo
hyprpm add https://github.com/surprizeattackxx-dotcom/hypr-gamma

# enable it
hyprpm enable hyprgamma

Then make sure your plugins load on login. Add this to hyprland.conf if it isn't there already:

exec-once = hyprpm reload -n

After a Hyprland update, refresh the plugin so it's rebuilt against the new version:

hyprpm update

You should see a green [hyprgamma] Loaded! notification when it starts.

Useful for development or if you'd rather not use hyprpm.

git clone https://github.com/surprizeattackxx-dotcom/hypr-gamma
cd hypr-gamma

# build the plugin
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -B build
cmake --build build -j"$(nproc)"
# -> build/libhyprgamma.so

# load it for the current session
hyprctl plugin load "$PWD/build/libhyprgamma.so"

⚠️ A manually built .so must be compiled against the headers of the exact Hyprland version you're running, or the plugin will refuse to load with a version-mismatch notification. hyprpm handles this for you; manual builds are on you.

The plugin registers a set of hyprctl commands (all prefixed hyprgamma:) and two dispatchers for keybinds. Per-monitor settings are persisted automatically after every change.

Keys accepted by set:

Find your monitor names with hyprctl monitors (e.g. DP-1, HDMI-A-1, eDP-1).

Examples

# dim the second monitor to 80%
hyprctl hyprgamma:set DP-2 brightness 0.8

# warm up a too-blue panel (lift red, drop blue)
hyprctl hyprgamma:set HDMI-A-1 gamma_r 0.9
hyprctl hyprgamma:set HDMI-A-1 gamma_b 1.2

# punch up contrast on the laptop screen
hyprctl hyprgamma:set eDP-1 contrast 1.15

# undo everything on every monitor
hyprctl hyprgamma:reset

Two dispatchers are exposed for bind:

# hyprland.conf
bind = $mainMod SHIFT, G, hyprgamma:reset    # reset all monitors to defaults
bind = $mainMod SHIFT, R, hyprgamma:reload   # reload config from disk

# bind step adjustments straight to hyprctl, too:
bind = , XF86MonBrightnessUp,   exec, hyprctl hyprgamma:set eDP-1 brightness 1.1
bind = , XF86MonBrightnessDown, exec, hyprctl hyprgamma:set eDP-1 brightness 0.9

A small companion app gives you live sliders for every monitor — it talks to the plugin over hyprctl, so the plugin must be loaded for it to do anything.

cd gui
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -B build
cmake --build build -j"$(nproc)"
./build/hyprgamma-gui

Each detected monitor gets a card with an enable toggle, brightness/contrast sliders, per-channel gamma sliders, and a Reset Monitor button. Changes apply instantly and are saved automatically.

Settings live at:

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/hypr/hyprgamma.json     # or ~/.config/hypr/hyprgamma.json

You normally never edit this by hand — the plugin and GUI manage it — but it's plain JSON if you want to version it or sync it across machines:

{
  "version": 1,
  "defaults": {
    "brightness": 1.0,
    "contrast": 1.0,
    "gamma_r": 1.0,
    "gamma_g": 1.0,
    "gamma_b": 1.0,
    "enabled": false
  },
  "monitors": {
    "DP-1": {
      "brightness": 0.85,
      "contrast": 1.1,
      "gamma_r": 1.0,
      "gamma_g": 1.0,
      "gamma_b": 1.05,
      "enabled": true
    }
  }
}

The config is loaded and applied on plugin init, and re-applied whenever a monitor is hotplugged.

For each monitor, hyprgamma builds a gammaSize × 3 lookup table and pushes it to the output via Hyprland's setGammaLut. For a normalized input n ∈ [0,1] on each channel:

out = clamp( ( pow(n, gamma) - 0.5 ) * contrast + 0.5 ) * brightness , 0, 1 )

A disabled monitor is given a plain identity ramp, so toggling enabled is a lossless on/off without discarding your saved values. Outputs that report a gamma table smaller than 10 entries (i.e. no real gamma support) are skipped.

[hyprgamma] Version mismatch notification / plugin won't load. Hyprland plugins are tied to the exact compositor build. Run hyprpm update to rebuild against your current Hyprland, or recompile a manual build against the matching headers.

A command returns error: gamma manager not initialized. The plugin didn't finish loading. Check hyprctl plugin list and your startup notification.

Nothing happens on a particular monitor. That output may not expose a usable gamma LUT (some virtual/remote/HDR-pipeline outputs don't). hyprgamma silently skips outputs with no gamma support.

Colors look washed out at high brightness. brightness > 1.0 multiplies values and will clip highlights — that's expected. Use it to brighten dim panels, not to push past 1.0 on an already-bright one.

hyprpm disable hyprgamma
hyprpm remove hyprgamma

For a manual load, just unload it: hyprctl plugin unload "$PWD/build/libhyprgamma.so".

BSD-3-Clause © donnie