Dimming a laptop's backlight when idle

[Aaron Stone]

Hi folks,

I've been hunting around for a while to try and find any previous work
on auto-dimming laptop backlights, and haven't found much at all.

Here's what I want to do while on battery:

 o After 1 minute of inactivity (no keyboard, no mouse) cut my 
   laptop's backlight brightness to minimum.
 o After 5 minutes of inactivity, cut the backlight altogether.

And while on AC:

 o After 15 minutes of inactivity, run a screensaver.

I've written a short script sending commands to /proc/acpi/ibm/backlight
(I have ThinkPad, as you might guess ;-), and set up the script as my
screensaver with xscreensaver. It checks the AC status, and handles
dimming then later turning off the backlight.

Two problems:

 o X automatically blanks the screen? I want DIM not BLANK!
 o I miss out on cool xscreensaver hacks because 'dimbacklight'
   is the only hack I have enabled right now :-(

I *think* I want what JWZ wants with XIDLE:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1419

With XIDLE, my script can grow up to be an Xlib client, call for XIDLE
status, do the dimming as needed, and let xscreensaver do its own thing.

Any signs of life on XIDLE since last February?


Thanks,
Aaron