I'm making a little application that needs to know how long the user has been idle — as in, not using a keyboard or a mouse. Both XCB and Xlib promise to give me idle time through their respective screensaver extensions. Here is where I get idle time with XCB:
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <xcb/xcb.h>
#include <xcb/screensaver.h>
static xcb_connection_t * connection;
static xcb_screen_t * screen;
/**
* Connects to the X server (via xcb) and gets the screen
*/
void magic_begin () {
connection = xcb_connect (NULL, NULL);
screen = xcb_setup_roots_iterator (xcb_get_setup (connection)).data;
}
/**
* Asks X for the time the user has been idle
* @returns idle time in milliseconds
*/
unsigned long magic_get_idle_time () {
xcb_screensaver_query_info_cookie_t cookie;
xcb_screensaver_query_info_reply_t *info;
cookie = xcb_screensaver_query_info (connection, screen->root);
info = xcb_screensaver_query_info_reply (connection, cookie, NULL);
uint32_t idle = info->ms_since_user_input;
free (info);
return idle;
}
However, this is behaving very differently than "ms_since_user_input" suggests. If I am watching a video (tested with Totem), the idle time resets to 0 within 30 seconds, without exception. The same thing happens with a number of games, which cause this even when they are paused! Using XLib, I get the exact same behaviour.
I might be able to improve the code that uses the idle time so this behaviour isn't as much of a problem, but I'd really like to get rid of the problem completely. I would prefer if I was only getting the time since the last user input event (and only the last user input event). I wouldn't mind using some other libraries to get there, as long as my program doesn't generate a lot of traffic.
Do you have any ideas for how this can be done?
