Using Openlux to help your sleep and/or relax your eyes

If you are familiar with research suggesting that blue light affects your sleep, you might also be familiar with a (free!) software named f.lux. I use it on my iDevices (used to use it on my computers too), and it works great …. except for a few issues.

The first is CPU consumption. Seriously, this software takes up a lot of CPU. That was the main reason behind ditching xflux (the X11 edition of the software). It also doesn’t entirely block out blue light, even at the lowest color temperature it allows (this is true for the iOS version too). There were a number of other issues that became annoying over time (forced very long animations, a daemon that rarely ever works as intended, sometimes the software doesn’t even work at all, mouse cursor being left entirely out of the picture, etc.). These would (probably) all be simple to fix …. however, it’s free as in price, not as in freedom. The software is closed-source.

Openlux is a very simple open-source MIT-licensed clone I wrote that tries to address these issues (minus the mouse cursor issue, that one is a bit more complex). For now, it doesn’t contain as many features as xflux does, but it is only a first release. Animations and the lot will come later :)

I haven’t worked on packaging yet (if anyone wishes to spend some time doing this, that would be greatly appreciated!!), but for now, visit https://github.com/AnonymouMeerkat/openlux for download and compilation information (sorry for the mess in main.c, I will get to that later!).

Here are a few usage examples

openlux                      # Sets the screen color temperature to 3400K (the default)
openlux -k 1000              # Sets the color temperature to 1000K
openlux -k 2000 -b 0         # Sets color temperature to 2000K, but removes all blue light
openlux -k 2000 -b 255       # Ditto, but blue is set to 255 (maximum value, gives the screen a magenta-ish tone)
openlux -r 130 -g 150 -b 100 # Gives the screen a dark swamp green tint (Kelvin value is ignored)
openlux -k 40000             # Sets the screen color temperature to 40000K
openlux -i                   # Resets the screen color temperature

I personally like using openlux -k 10000 during the day (very relaxing for the eyes!), and openlux -k 2300 -b 40 during the night.

I hope this can be useful for you!! If you have any issues, suggestions, feedback, etc. (even if you just want to say thank-you — those are always appreciated ^^), feel free to write a comment or send me an email!

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