Re: Prevent screen from going to sleep

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

hi;

On 1 March 2012 10:07, Marco <netuse lavabit com> wrote:
>> adding  a   potentially  damaging   setting  (you   disable  power
>> management ->  your display  never turns off  -> you  lose battery
>> juice  -> you  lose documents,  your backlight  gets progressively
>> worse, your battery  gets progressively worse, etc)  to paper over
>> something  that should  be  automatic is  not a  good  use of  the
>> setting system, nor it is a good use of the user's time.
>
> I get your point. But the  automatism don't always work. What if I'm
> working on the  shell and watch the  output of a program.  I have to
> press a button from  time to time to keep my  screen alive. It would
> be  so  easy  to  simply  turn  off  the  scrren  blanking  for  the
> time  the program  is  operating  and I  think  that's exactly  what
> “sleep-display-battery|ac” was made for. Correct me if I'm wrong.

we have two wildly different definitions of the word "easy": going
into the system settings, finding the right panel, toggling the right
option. then, obviously, doing the reverse when it's time to disable
it - *if* I remember to do that.

now - if you find yourself doing this far too many times, which has
never been the case for me for the past 10 years, but I assume I'm
special that way - something "easy" would be to have an extension that
toggled the screensaver inhibit; given that the API requires a token,
you'll need to get some state and hold it. luckily, it's DBus all the
way down, and writing DBus client code in JavaScript is not half bad.
you can have an extension sitting on your top panel, or in the message
area. we used to have an inhibit applet for gnome-panel, ages ago, to
come to the rescue of broken applications (and Flash).

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi/