Idea: suppress idle lock/screensaver while audio/video is actively playing

[LexGrishin]

Idea: suppress idle lock/screensaver while audio/video is actively playing

The problem

Omarchy's idle screensaver/lock timers are driven purely by keyboard/mouse idle time. Watching a movie or a long video without touching the input devices eventually triggers the screensaver/lock mid-playback, even though you're clearly not idle.

Proposal

Detect actively-playing (non-corked) PipeWire/PulseAudio streams and automatically drive the existing "Stay Awake" toggle from that:

• the instant any app has a stream that's actively playing (not corked/paused), enable stay-awake
• the instant nothing is playing, let normal idle lock/screensaver resume

This reuses the Stay Awake state that already exists (the cup icon / idle enable/disable IPC) — it just needs something to drive it automatically based on playback instead of only manual toggling.

Working implementation

I've been running this as a small user-level systemd service for a while and it's been solid — no dependencies beyond pactl/PipeWire, about 25 lines:

#!/bin/bash
is_playing() {
  pactl list sink-inputs 2>/dev/null | grep -q "Corked: no"
}

update_state() {
  if is_playing; then
    omarchy-shell idle disable >/dev/null 2>&1
  else
    omarchy-shell idle enable >/dev/null 2>&1
  fi
}

update_state
pactl subscribe 2>/dev/null | while read -r line; do
  case "$line" in
    *sink-input*) update_state ;;
  esac
done

Run as a systemd --user service alongside the shell.

Why I think it's worth considering upstream

This feels like a common enough pain point (anyone watching video on their laptop) that it could be a built-in toggle (e.g. idle.suppressOnPlayback in shell.json) instead of something everyone has to hand-roll. Happy to clean this up and open a PR if there's interest — mainly wanted to gauge whether this fits Omarchy's direction before doing that work.