On Wed, Jan 14, 2004 at 12:15:17PM -0600, John Maier wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone knows of or is there something that will kick off
> a textual based screensaver when a terminal/console has been idle for N
> minutes?
> 
> I seem to remember pcvt having something like this LONG ago, back in the
> 1.0ish era of NetBSD, but it seems pcvt lost the feature along the way and
> wscons doens't seems to have anything.
> 
> There are times I walk away from a build or console and there it sits for
> days.....

Yes, it's not ideal.

> My particular solution is I just add ; /usr/games/worms -d 200 -n 1 after my
> make or whatever is going to take a while (if I remeber).
> 
> It would be neat if there was an option in screenblank to "do something"
> aside from blank the screen.  However screenblank doesn't address a xterm,
> ssh, serial terminal or telnet.
> 

AFAICT screenblank does not work properly - and hasn't for quite some time.
I posted a query about this around mid-2003 and this was acknowledged, but
after that...nothing.

Is screenblank ever going to be fixed...?  (Admittedly, I run 1.6.1, and if
screenblank has been fixed after that, then please correct me!)

> I would like to start with what is common (perhaps not obvious [to me])
> before beginning to reinvent the wheel.
> 
> jam
>