How can I enable and adjust Macbook Pro 2013's keyboard backlight?

Question

Earlier today I went ahead and replaced MacOS with Manjaro Deepin, but I decided to shop around some more for other distros and came across Elementary OS. Everything on Elementary seems to be working fine aside from the keyboard backlight, something that did work on Manjaro. Resources regarding this, on StackExchange, GitHub, Reddit etc. are very sparse and I've tried everything I've been able to find through three hours of research. Where do I start looking here? I'm not sure if there is something built into Ubuntu already that globally controls keyboard lighting, or if I have to write some kind of script for this et cetera.

Any ideas? I managed to map the volume keys to the corresponding mac keybord function keys through the keyboard settings, but as far as backlight goes I'm at a total loss. Any help is appreciated, worst case scenario I'll have to go back to Manjaro but I quite like elementary.

Answer 1

edit: worked it out myself by dumb luck. For anyone in the future that happens to have this issue, there is indeed a built-in global keyboard brightness feature in ubuntu. It's located at /sys/class/leds/smc::kbd_backlight where you can edit a bunch of things, but what's most interesting is the "brightness" config file. You can edit this directly in Terminal by writing the following:

echo [value] | sudo tee /sys/class/leds/smc::kbd_backlight/brightness

Change [value] to what you want your brightness to be, the max is set to 255 and that is what I went with. I assume keyboard shortcuts can be added that references this so that you can lower and raise it incrementally, but personally I don't care so I won't do that. Oh well, you live and you learn.