I love i3 for obvious reasons (light, maxing screen size, ability to customize). However, my screen times out after five minutes of inactivity. I would like to turn this off, how?
X.org has some basic screen saver functionality as well as energy saving features. Most likely either or both are responsible for the described behavior.
The settings for both can be viewed and changed with the xset tool (from the x11-xserver-utils package). xset q displays the current settings in the sections Screen Saver and DPMS (Energy Star).
You can disable the screen saver feature with:
xset s off
The power saving feature can be turned off with
xset -dpms
With these settings the screen should no longer turn off or blank automatically until you reboot your machine.
If your main concern is that 5 minutes are to short, you can also just raise the limits for that. To enable the screen saver only after 15 minutes (900 seconds) idle time, set the timeout accordingly with
xset s 900
To turn off the monitor after 20 minutes of idling run
xset dpms 0 0 1200
The two 0 values disable standby and suspend respectively, while 1200 sets the timeout for off to 20 minutes. (I usually do not use standby or suspend because there seems to be no difference between the three modes on modern TFT-displays.) Setting these values also enables DPMS, so you do not need to explicitly run xset +dpms.
X.org has some basic screen saver functionality as well as energy saving features. Most likely either or both are responsible for the described behavior.
The settings for both can be viewed and changed with the
xsettool (from thex11-xserver-utilspackage).xset qdisplays the current settings in the sections Screen Saver and DPMS (Energy Star).You can disable the screen saver feature with:
The power saving feature can be turned off with
With these settings the screen should no longer turn off or blank automatically until you reboot your machine.
If your main concern is that 5 minutes are to short, you can also just raise the limits for that. To enable the screen saver only after 15 minutes (900 seconds) idle time, set the timeout accordingly with
To turn off the monitor after 20 minutes of idling run
The two
0values disable standby and suspend respectively, while1200sets the timeout for off to 20 minutes. (I usually do not use standby or suspend because there seems to be no difference between the three modes on modern TFT-displays.) Setting these values also enables DPMS, so you do not need to explicitly runxset +dpms.xset did not work for me.
what did work was modifying
and changing timeout to something very large like
and then after saving the file - not sure if it's necessary, but to be sure I do in terminal:
and then you can always change it back later.