Prevent input from waking displays

Ask Fedora
1

I’m running Fedora 40 KDE on x11, and I’m trying to set a keyboard shortcut that blanks and wakes my displays without any other input from my mouse or keyboard waking them. Unfortunately I have a cat who likes to walk over my keyboard.

Things I’ve tried:

  • Bind a key combo to a script that toggles between xset dpms force on and xset dpms force off. I tried adding logic that would disable/enable inputs with xinput --set-prop, but of course I can’t send a key combo with a disabled keyboard.
  • Turn off/on my displays with ddcutil. Turning off works great, but my stupid AOC Q27G3XMN doesn’t adhere to VESA standards and drops DDC/CI communication when turned off, so it can’t then be turned back on via ddcutil.

I specifically want to execute a script with mentioned key combo to wake my displays so I can also trigger other logic at the same time, for example turning on my PC lighting. I’m open to suggestions for how to accomplish the end result through other mechanisms as well.

2

… Ok … I have a question here …
IF you set the things to not respond to the keyboard/mouse/inputs … how do you intend to wake things back up?

And …
Like you, I also have multiple cats that like to send email when I am away from my computer. My cure was to lock-screen and flip the keyboard over.

3

That is what I said, of course I can’t send a key combo with a disabled keyboard. I mentioned it because I thought it may spark an idea for how to get such a setup working. I had hoped I’d be able to find a way to just get the power manager to not watch for input devices to wake the screen.

My keyboard is a relatively chunky mechanical that would just press its keys if I tried flipping it over lol.