// the find
rizkiawanAldo/brightness-bridge
Tiny Windows background service that makes laptop brightness keys (Fn+☀) control external monitors via ClickMonitorDDC
A ~200-line C program that bridges laptop brightness keys to external monitor DDC/CI control by intercepting raw HID Consumer Control events (0x006F/0x0070) and shelling out to ClickMonitorDDC. Solves a real, annoying gap in Windows external monitor support. Squarely aimed at developers or power users with laptop+monitor setups who don't want a separate shortcut manager.
Raw HID input via RegisterRawInputDevices is the correct approach here — polling or keyboard hooks would miss these events entirely. The dependency-by-proximity pattern (auto-detects ClickMonitorDDC*.exe in the same directory) avoids registry/config hell. At ~59KB with no runtime dependencies, it's genuinely tiny and auditable. Includes a Python diagnostic script to verify the right HID usage codes are firing, which shows the author actually debugged this properly.
Hard dependency on ClickMonitorDDC means you're spawning a full external process on every keypress instead of calling the DDC/CI WinAPI (SetVCPFeature) directly — this adds latency and couples you to a third-party binary. BRIGHTNESS_STEP is a compile-time constant, so changing the step percentage requires a rebuild. No multi-monitor awareness: 'b +10' broadcasts to all monitors equally, which isn't what you want if one is a TV at the other end of the room. Two stars on GitHub, no binary release on the releases page — you're building it yourself or running a pre-built exe from a stranger.