wprintidle

wprintidle is a command line tool to print the users idle time to stdout. It serves as an alternative to xprintidle for Wayland environments, and is compatible with Wayland compositors that implement the ext-idle-notify protocol.

Table of Contents

• wprintidle
  • Motivation
  • Usage
    • Example
  • Dependencies
  • Compiling
    • Build without Installing
    • Build and Install
  • Differences from xprintidle
  • License

Motivation

The direct inspiration for this project was xprintidle, while my motivation for completing it was largely personal. Indeed, while I was reviewing my own Emacs customizations along with org-clock.el I found a setting that I had either never noticed or forgotten: org-clock-x11idle-program-name. I had been meaning to write my first Wayland program for some time, and it occurred to me that there's no equivalent in the Wayland world despite seeing requests for the feature with projects like swayidle.

Usage

Using the utility will be fairly straightforward even without a lot of command line experience.

We can run wprintidle without specifying any options, in which case it will pick an arbitrary seat, or a seat can be provided. For example, wprintidle -s default will bind to the seat named default. After starting the program send SIGUSR1 to print idle time in seconds, or SIGUSR2 for milliseconds.

See the wprintidle(1) man page for additional details.

Example

As a simple test start wprintidle in a terminal, then open another terminal to send the signals.

Terminal 1:

$ wprintidle

Terminal 2:

$ sleep 5 && pkill -USR1 wprintidle && pkill -USR2 wprintidle

Output (terminal 1):

5
4953

Dependencies

• Zig 0.14.0*
• wayland
• wayland-protocols*
• scdoc**

* Compile-time only

** Optional for man pages

Compiling

The examples below demonstrate how to build the program with and without installing it. Use zig build -h to see all available options.

Build without Installing

zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe

Build and Install

zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe --prefix=/usr install

Differences from xprintidle

The primary difference from its cousin, xprintidle, is that wprintidle must be running in order to report idle time. Because Wayland specifies that the compositor is the arbiter of idle events, we cannot simply ask for the time or rely on other programs like screensavers. Accordingly, we query wprintidle by sending signals rather than providing command line arguments.

License

wprintidle is licensed under the General Public License Version 3.