This is a little utility to bridge between dbus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver Inhibit/UnInhibit messages and systemd's logind idle inhibits. The usecase is to provide environments like i3/sway a mechanism to inhibit the screensaver when browsers and the like are playing video. It relies on other tools like swayidle respecting systemd's logind inhibits.

It provides a visual indicator in the status tray (if present) as to whether it is currently holding any inhibits. Green for none held, yellow for programmatic inhibits and red if there is a manual inhibit in place. A manual inhibit can be placed via the menu available from the systray status icon or toggled by sending SIGUSR1. Using SIGUSR1 allows you to wire up hotkeys in sway/i3/whatever to change the inhibit state without the mouse. If not systray is present, the tool will still function but status won't be visible.

inhibitor will heartbeat check peers that have requested programatic inhibits so that it doesn't leave the machine in an inhibited state in the case where the requesting peer program has crashed.

It works with recent versions of both Chrome, Firefox and vlc. In Firefox, you may need to enable dom.wakelock.enabled in about:config so that dbus messages are sent.

It accepts the following flags:

• --heartbeat - how often to check peers for liveness.
• --logfile - where to write logs
• --manual_inhibit_timeout - the duration for which manual inhibits are honoured
• --notify - whether to send notifications of state changes in some cases
• --verbose - whether to write logs

inhibitor is available under the Simplified BSD License; see LICENSE for the full text.