Because xautolock is annoying to work with.
xidlehook is a general-purpose replacement for xautolock. It executes a command when the computer has been idle for a specified amount of time.
Improvements over xautolock:
- Allows “cancellers” which can undo a timer action when new user activity is detected.
- Unlimited amount of timers (provided necessary resources).
- Not specific to locking.
- Multiple instances can run at the same time.
- Optionally only run through chain once.
- Optionally prevent locking when an application is fullscreen.
- Optionally prevent locking when any application plays audio.
Missing features:
- Magic corners
- All the instance related stuff (you should use unix sockets with –socket).
Here’s a lock using i3lock, with screen dim support:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Only exported variables can be used within the timer's command.
export PRIMARY_DISPLAY="$(xrandr | awk '/ primary/{print $1}')"
# Run xidlehook
xidlehook \
`# Don't lock when there's a fullscreen application` \
--not-when-fullscreen \
`# Don't lock when there's audio playing` \
--not-when-audio \
`# Dim the screen after 60 seconds, undim if user becomes active` \
--timer 60 \
'xrandr --output "$PRIMARY_DISPLAY" --brightness .1' \
'xrandr --output "$PRIMARY_DISPLAY" --brightness 1' \
`# Undim & lock after 10 more seconds` \
--timer 10 \
'xrandr --output "$PRIMARY_DISPLAY" --brightness 1; i3lock' \
'' \
`# Finally, suspend an hour after it locks` \
--timer 3600 \
'systemctl suspend' \
''
Note: Every command is passed through =sh -c=, so you should be able to mostly use normal syntax.
As of currently, you will need to use the Rust 1.39.0 higher when building xidlehook.
Recommended installation is through the Nix package manager, which will get you a sane default configuration of xidlehook as well as all required libraries.
nix-env -iA nixpkgs.xidlehook
will install xidlehook regardless of whether you have rust installed, regardless of whether you have libxcb and friends installed, whatever. Nix just works.
If you instead would like to use the latest master, you can install it using the following.
nix-env -if https://gitlab.com/jD91mZM2/xidlehook/-/archive/master.tar.gz
While I do definitely encourage you to try Nix if you haven’t already, there are other ways to install xidlehook, of course. But it will involve some system-specific trouble I can’t really help you with.
Arch Linux users can avoid that, however, thanks to an unofficial AUR package!
Xidlehook with the default settings requires libxcb, libXScrnSaver
(or libxss) and libpulseaudio. On debian/ubuntu, don’t forget to
install the -dev
versions of all the mentioned dependencies, also.
Which feature flag? | Native dependency |
---|---|
Always | libxcb, libXScrnSaver (aka libxss) |
When using –features pulse (default) | libpulseaudio |
After getting these native libraries, one way of installing is with cargo, the official rust package manager that works almost everywhere with rust installed.
cargo install xidlehook --bins
Or if you want to clone it manually:
git clone https://gitlab.com/jD91mZM2/xidlehook
cd xidlehook
cargo build --release --bins
The socket API can be communicated with over JSON. The full data and
types for these structures can be seen in all the struct definitions of
xidlehook/src/socket/models.rs
.
For convenience, there is now an xidlehook-client (see #18), which will communicate with this API for you. See
xidlehook-client --help
for details.
A common use case of xidlehook
is using it to run a lockscreen. To
then manually lock the screen, you could first decide what ID the
timer has, either by counting the indexes yourself of the timers you
inform xidlehook of (starting from 0), or by querying timer
information after starting it:
# Check what timer(s) you want to trigger...
xidlehook-client --socket /path/to/xidlehook.sock query
And then bind a hotkey or bash alias to lock it:
# Trigger it/them
xidlehook-client --socket /path/to/xidlehook.sock control --action trigger --timer <my timer id>
If you’re looking for a more elaborate client to temporarily disable
xidlehook
, take a look at caffeinate which has timers and PID based
monitoring.
If you have redshift
running, the brightness of your screen will be quickly overriden by redshift
.
You can specify the brightness of the screen via redshift
instead of xrandr
to fix this issue.