simon - System Idle MONitor

This is a small program for managing laptop screen brightness and sleeps after some idle time, based on whether the laptop is on AC or battery power.

Supports arbitrary actions with different times for AC/battery via a profile file, the path to which is set in $HOME/.config/simon/config.sh

simon uses sysfs/procfs where possible, but currently uses systemd for avoiding conflicts with other sleeps - this shouldn't be too hard to swap out if your system is a magical unicorn and hence doesn't use systemd.

Should work out of the box for: my laptop :)

Installation

• Place the simon executable somewhere on your $PATH

• Copy the files from config to ~/.config

• Add yourself to the power group to be able to sleep the system as your user.

To run simon as yourself at startup, add the line

simon &

to your .xinitrc.

Configuration

There are three files defining simon's behaviour:

• ~/.config/simon/config.sh: set the current $PROFILE, along with appropriate sysfs settings for your system

• ~/.config/simon/functions.sh: this gets sourced by the main script and you can use it to add any function you want

• ~/.config/simon/$PROFILE: the profile to use. An example profile is provided in ~/.config/simon/profiles and pointed to by ~/.config/simon/current_profile

Profiles

An example profile file looks like this

# a comment
#function       btime   atime   sensitive   args...
reset_screen    0       0       false
darken_screen   60      600     false       10  30
turn_off_screen 90      600     false
suspend         x       300     true
hibernate       300     x       true

• function: Function to execute when rule is met. This can be a function defined in this file, or an existing system utility

• atime/btime: Time in seconds before triggering for AC/battery. If x, do not trigger in this mode. If 0, trigger when user returns from being idle

• sensitive: true if function does session management (logout, suspend, poweroff etc). false otherwise

• args: Arguments to pass to the function. Can only be plaintext, but you get to write the functions, so, you can make this as powerful as you want.

Any number of tabs or spaces delimit fields. Anything following a # is treated as a comment.

Credit

This program was based on a script posted by user rkwurth on the #! forums: http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=26447