This daemon detects keypresses or mice movements. The user can be anywhere: virtual terminals outside of X, terminals in X or in Wayland. All mice movements are known, including gpm. idled uses a heuristic match of udev symlink names in /sys/ to determine the keyboard and mouse devices to monitor. It handles added/removed devices by rescanning from start.
Right now, this is used only to tell if you're at the keyboard or not, and generate afk/back output messages and/or logfile. There is a state machine with crude heuristics to determine when you are idle, back, etc.
Idle state could inform other things. The plan is to implement configurable scripts / shell commands that will trigger on state changes.
Lots of integration possibilities with the window manager and time tracking tools.
The config file ~/.idlerc configures idled:
unidle_keyboard_count: 3 unidle_keyboard_secs: 10 unidle_mouse_count: 60 unidle_mouse_secs: 7 idle_secs: 30 restart_secs: 3 rescan_secs: 2
In the future we will add variables to configure execve() on idle
events.
TODO detail those variables!
When devices are added and removed, idled currently rescans devices, resetting the global idle state machine. We could keep a per-device state in the future and use them to infer the global idle state.
The overhead is very low. It uses an edge triggered kernel event. TODO confirm. Specifically, it uses epoll(7) and inotify(7) mechanisms via ctypes-linked C code (via pypi inotify library at the moment).
Requires: inotify-0.2.10+ | https://pypi.org/project/inotify/
We use inotify lib from pypi, but what we use from it is small and we should just port this into idled. We have to go through unnecessary abstractions and have limitation on sleep time per loop when using the library library. Better to do ourselves.
example debug run:
$ DEBUG=1 sudo idled debug: enabled > /home/scott/bin/idled(519)main() -> process_rcfile() (Pdb) r debug: making async task process_events-8154414866282 debug: making async task watch_devices-8154414866292 20241030200522 2s device enumeration sleep... debug: paths ['/dev/input/by-path/pci-0000:00:14.0-usb-0:4.2:1.1-event-kbd', '/dev/input/by-path/platform-i8042-serio-0-event-kbd', '/dev/input/by-path/pci-0000:00:14.0-usb-0:4.4:1.0-event-mouse', '/dev/input/by-path/pci-0000:00:15.1-platform-i2c_designware.1-event-mouse'] debug: making async task queue_events-8154414866272 debug: making async task queue_events-8154414866272 debug: making async task queue_events-8154414866272 debug: making async task queue_events-8154414866272 20241030200524 monitoring 4 inputs debug: fd6: type:1, code:30, value:1 debug: fd6: type:0, code:0, value:0 debug: fd6: saw 3, processed 1, key 1, mouse 0 debug: fd6: type:1, code:30, value:0 debug: fd6: type:0, code:0, value:0 debug: fd6: saw 3, processed 1, key 0, mouse 0 debug: fd6: type:1, code:48, value:1 debug: fd6: type:0, code:0, value:0 debug: fd6: saw 3, processed 1, key 1, mouse 0 debug: fd6: type:1, code:48, value:0 debug: fd6: type:0, code:0, value:0 debug: fd6: saw 3, processed 1, key 0, mouse 0 debug: fd8: type:2, code:0, value:1 debug: fd8: type:2, code:1, value:-2 debug: fd8: type:0, code:0, value:0 debug: fd8: saw 3, processed 2, key 0, mouse 2 debug: fd8: type:2, code:1, value:-1 debug: fd8: type:0, code:0, value:0 debug: fd8: saw 2, processed 1, key 0, mouse 1 debug: fd8: type:2, code:1, value:-1 debug: fd8: type:0, code:0, value:0 debug: fd8: saw 2, processed 1, key 0, mouse 1