The laptop I have does not have dedicated keys for keyboard backlight, and the function keys that used to do it on older machines have no effect.
Mostly I want to turn the backlight off entirely — it is distracting in a dark room and I do not need it.
Where did the control go, and is there any way to get the old key behaviour back?
The control moved into Control Centre. Open it from the menu bar and there is a keyboard brightness item with a slider — drag it to the bottom and the backlight is off.
If it is not showing there, it can be added: in system settings, under the Control Centre section, keyboard brightness can be set to appear in Control Centre or in the menu bar directly. Putting it in the menu bar gives you a one-click control, which is what I use.
There is also an automatic adjustment setting in the keyboard preferences that dims the backlight based on ambient light and turns it off after a period of inactivity. If the backlight keeps coming back on after you turn it down, that setting is why.
For getting the function keys back, a keyboard customisation utility can remap them. The well-known open source one for macOS handles this — you map the relevant function keys to the backlight increase and decrease events, and the old muscle memory works again.
It does require granting the utility input monitoring permission, which is a meaningful thing to hand over, so use a well-known project rather than the first result.
Worth noting that these remapping tools sometimes need updating after a major system release, since the permissions model and the key event handling change. That is the maintenance cost of the approach and it is small but not zero.
Small note if the goal is specifically a dark room: the keyboard backlight and the display's automatic brightness are separate systems with separate settings.
Turning off keyboard backlight ambient adjustment does not affect the display, and vice versa. People often turn one off, find the room still lights up, and conclude the setting did not work.
@brew_baris · last wk.
One thing that confuses people about why the keys vanished: the function row on these machines is shared between system functions and application functions, and which one you get depends on a setting.
So on some machines the keys are not missing so much as assigned to something else, and the behaviour of the modifier key is inverted from what you expect. Checking the keyboard settings for how the function row behaves is worth doing before installing anything, because occasionally the keys work and are simply behind the modifier.
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