Idlehack for Sway

Listen for Firefox/Chromium dbus messages that request screensaver inhibit, typically because the user is watching video. Sway doesn't currently listen for such messages, so here we create a daemon that listens for these messages and then invokes "/bin/swayidle-inhibit" which is responsible for temporarily disabling the screen blanking.

The XScreenSaver code which handled this was scavenged off of the net and hacked, most of the credit should go to them.

Idlehack needs to be running in the background in order to create the dbus listener before Firefox is launched. Firefox only checks for the Dbus end-points when first starting. If it sees the dbus listener, it will send the inhibit messages every time video is playing.

Idlehack will call /bin/swayidle-inhibit everytime such a message is received from Firefox.

You need a "/bin/swayidle-inhibit" that will do whatever is necessary to inhibit the screensaver on your system for say 60 seconds. Idlehack will keep calling this command while the video is playing. It's done this way so that your screensaver isn't permanently inhibited if Firefox crashes while holding the lock.

For a Systemd based system

Compile "idlehack" and move the executable to "/usr/libexec/"

Copy the "idlehack.service" file to "/etc/systemd/user/"

Copy "swayidle-inhibit" to "/bin/"

Run:

systemctl --user enable idlehack

systemctl --user start idlehack

Then restart Firefox

You can do "systemctl --user status idlehack" after starting a video to see that the inhibit has been called.