Khamosh Pathak When you are in a dark room, you can increase the brightness of your MacBook Air keyboard to make typing easier. There are two ways to do this: using the function keys on your keyboard or the Control Center in macOS.
Adjust keyboard brightness on an Intel MacBook Air
If you are using a manufactured MacBook Air before the MacBook Air M1 2020 (when Apple switched to its own puce Apple Silicon) , it's actually quite easy to manually adjust the keyboard brightness.
LOGIN: How to check if your Mac is using an Intel or Apple Silicon processor
On your MacBook Air keyboard, press the F5 key to lower the k eyboard and press the F6 key to increase the keyboard brightness.
Apple Adjust keyboard brightness to an Apple Silicon MacBook Air
With the introduction of the MacBook Air 2020 with an M1 chip, Apple has changedthe design of the MacBook Air keyboard. The company replaced the launchpad and keyboard brightness control keys with Spotlight, Dictation, and Do Not Disturb buttons.
Apple So how to increase keyboard brightness or activate keyboard illumination on your Macbook Air now that the keys are missing? You can simply use the Keyboard Brightness slider in Control Center, or you can install a third-party app to remap the F5 and F6 keys to the old keyboard brightness behavior.
Adjust keyboard brightness using Control Center on Mac
Are you looking for adedicated keyboard brightness module in the macOS control center (available in macOS Big Sur and above).
LOGIN: How to use Control Center on Mac
To get started, click on the Control Center icon (next to the time and date ).
Here, select the "Keyboard brightness button ".
Then use the slider to increase or decrease the keyboard brightness.
If you often find yourself adjusting the brightness of the keyboard, you can pin the command keyboard brightness to the menu bar itself .
Open Control Center, click on the "Keyboard Brightness " command anddrag it to the menu bar.
Now click on the Keyboard Brightness icon in the menu bar to instantly display the brightness slider.
Remap keyboard brightness keys on MacBook Air
While the control of keyboard brightness is nice, you can still use the physical keys to control the keyboard brightness, especially if you don't find much use for the Dictation and Do Not Disturb function keys on your Mac.
HappyOf course, you can revert to the old behavior using a simple application. All you have to do is insta in the app Karabiner Elements . It is a free, open source and stable key mapping tool for macOS. Its default profile will automatically restore the keyboard brightness function keys.
After you download and install the Karabiner Elements app, you will need to allow the app to monitor your keyboard input so that it can remap keys.
In macOS, you will need to give the application express permission from the System Preferences menu.
Click on the Apple icon in the menu bar and choose the "System Preferences " option to begin.
Then go to the “Security and confidentiality” section.
Here, select the "Privacy " tab and click on the lock button to be able to make changes.
Scan your fingerprint using Touch ID or enter your password to unlock the settings.
In the section "Input Monitoring ", click on the check mark next to the "karabiner_grabber " and "karabiner_observer " options.
You can now close the System Preferences window.
Return to the Karabiner Elements application and navigate to the "Keys tab function ". Here, make sure that the F5 key is selected as" illumination_decrement "and that the F6 key is mapped to the" illumination_increment "option.
Finally, press the F5 key to decrease the brightness of the keyboard and the F6 key to increase it. If that doesn't work right away, close and restart the Karabiner Elements application.
And that 's it. You have now restored the original keyboard brightness controls for the MacBook Air keyboard.
Did you know that the macOS Control Center is customizable? Here is how to add and remove control center modules on your Mac.
LOGIN: How to customize Control Center on Mac
