Turn off keyboard backlight after a certain period of idleness

Requirements

• linux
• systemd
• go 1.12 or above

Installation

In order to get a full setup clone the repo than then run make install.

$ git clone [email protected]:Shadowbeetle/skbl.git
$ make install

This installs the binary, creates a user systemd service, adds your user to the group input and creates the necessary config files.

To start using skbl with the default setup simply run:

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl start skbl@$USER.service

If the keyboard backlight is not turned back on after hitting any key, read the Initial setup section.

Enable the service to start skbl on startup

$ sudo systemctl enable skbl@$USER.service

You can of course use skbl by simply running go get and set everythin up yourself by hand as well.

$ go get github.com/Shadowbeetle/skbl

Initial setup

skbl listens to events from /dev/input/mice and /dev/input/event4. Your keyboard might be a mapped to a different event, so you probably need to change that.

1. you'll need to find the approprate iput file:

$ ls -lah /dev/input/by-path/

2. find the ones that might be keyboards (usually have kbd in them)
3. test with cat /dev/input/by-path/<kbd-input>
4. if you see gibberish appear in the terminal, you're good.

Configuration

skbl can be configured by the following ways (consecutive modes override the previous ones):

1. /etc/skbl/config.toml is the system wide default config
2. $HOME/.skbl/config.toml is the config of the given user
3. using flags

Conifg file

Installing skbl with make install creates the default config file in /etc/skbl, and the user config in $HOME/.skbl for the user running make. Additional users need to create their own config files.

$ mkdir $HOME/.skbl
$ cp /etc/skbl/config.toml $HOME/.skbl

The config file currently has two fields:

wait-seconds = "10s" # idle time after which backlight should be turned off
inputs = ["/dev/input/mice", "/dev/input/event4"] # input files to listen to

for more information on inputs see Initial setup.

Flags

Individual sessions can be configured using flags as well eg.

$ skbl --wait 1s --input /dev/input/event1 --input /dev/input/mice
# or
$ skbl -w 1s -i /dev/input/event1 -i /dev/input/mice