This handy little Bash script listens for screen saver inhibit events on Wayland and automatically stops or restarts swayidle accordingly.

When something "inhibits" the screen (like a video player or presentation), the script stops swayidle to prevent your screen from locking or going to sleep. When the inhibition ends, it restarts swayidle with your preferred timeout settings.

Tested on Arch Linux 6.17.9-arch1-1 ~~ KDE Plasma 6.5.4 kwin

At the beginning, about half a year ago, I didn’t know much about swayidle, but I feel that by now I’ve pretty much figured out all of its behavior.

Sometimes the screensaver starts in a slightly odd way or not exactly when you would expect it to, but this is not a bug in the script — it’s simply how swayidle works.

For example:

If Chrome is open and some kind of media player is running in the background (on another tab), swayidle will not start counting idle time, because it considers the process active. It only starts counting once the window is minimized to the taskbar.

GameMode inhibition is a different story: even though GameMode uses inhibit, it does not affect swayidle. swayidle will still count idle time even when a game is running in fullscreen — which I actually think is a really good thing.

Because of this, the earlier “kill swayidle for everything” approach didn’t really make sense. That’s why this script has gone through several hours (actually several days… but don’t tell my wife 😄) of testing. I hope this version finally eliminates the issues that existed in the previous script.

If you do find any bugs, feel free to report them in the Issues section!

• Listens for Inhibit and UnInhibit signals on the DBus org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver interface. 🏞️
• On Inhibit → stops swayidle completely 🔒
• On Inhibit from GameMode (com.feralinteractive.GameMode) → only screensaver runs, suspend disabled 🎮
• On Inhibit from any other application (e.g., YouTube in Chromium, VLC) → swayidle fully stopped (if its on the Top screen not in the tray) 💻
• On UnInhibit → restarts swayidle with the correct mode 🔓
• Monitors Custom apps and GameMode activity continuously 📊
• If custom apps or GameMode running → only screensaver mode 📦
• If neither running and no other inhibit → full mode (screensaver + suspend) 🏞️
• Logs activity state changes and relevant inhibit/uninhibit events to terminal 📋
• Runs as a single process → it will appears 3 PID in process lists (one the main app, one for the DBUS monitor, and the last is for the custom app checker) 🛠️

This script requires:

• bash
• dbus-monitor (part of dbus package)
• swayidle (Wayland idle management tool)
• xscreensaver-command (for activating screensaver, optional)

sudo pacman -S xscreensaver xscreensaver-extras xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-data xscreensaver-data-extra swayidle

sudo dnf install xscreensaver xscreensaver-extras xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra xscreensaver-data-extra swayidle

sudo yum install xscreensaver xscreensaver-extras xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra xscreensaver-data-extra swayidle

sudo apt install xscreensaver xscreensaver-data xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra xscreensaver-data-extra swayidle

• Version 1.7 So I figured it out (again), that only killing the swayidle is not enough, it needs also the Xscreensaver to be killed, because other X11 apps (even if you using wayland), can call its API. Also the grace timer is removed because it was unneccesarry, not that caused the issue.
• Version 1.6 Added Grace time for the script, checking if the process really running, killing swayidle process when inhibit activated
• Version 1.5 Brand new app as I can say, I learend a much about swayidle, now the code is simplier, faster, stronger, better. Added more easier variables to set up, more transparent than before.
• Version 1.3 More optimalised, better serial echoes. Fixed the .xscreensaver file, that caused all the issue.
• Version 1.2b The previouses version doesnt stopped/opened swayidle properly, now it seems OK but needs more time to test it out how its working in different cases.
  Please test it out is it working for you properly, if not, open a new isssue to discuss it.
• Version 1.1 Wanted to fix issues but still doesnt worked well.
• Version 1.0 The first script, barely untested, not optimalised.