FAQ

What is xprintidle-ng?

xprintidle-ng is a utility that queries the X server for the user's idle time and prints it in milliseconds (or with a custom format string).

What should I use xprintidle-ng for?

Scripts. Emacs configurations. Things like that. It's not a very ambitious tool.

Why did you make this?

I saw the xprintidle tool that this repository is based on and thought it was a shame that it wasn't yet overengineered in the grand GNU tradition. Also, I felt like learning how to properly organize a GNU autotools project, complete with internationalization support, texinfo documentation, etc. It seemed like a fun and easy learning experience, especially since I could easily work off of GNU Hello as an example (I mean, xprintidle was already pretty much just GNU Hello, except it displays the result of an API call rather than a constant string).

README

NOTE: This README may be out of date relative to the one in the GitHub repository.

Installation

Basically, type ./configure && make && sudo make install to compile and install the program. If you are compiling from the git repository, you must run ./bootstrap beforehand.

Dependencies

Build requirements

The following common executables must be available to build xprintidle-ng:

• cat, sed, tr, grep, mkdir, find
• git, wget, perl, gzip, sha1sum
• bash, gcc, make

These executables are less common and are also required:

• autoconf, automake, autopoint, autoreconf, autom4te, libtoolize
• pkg-config, m4, gettext et al.
• help2man, makeinfo

Runtime requirements

The following libraries must be available to run xprintidle-ng:

• libxss (also known as libXScrnSaver or similar)
• libXext
• libX11

Here is a short summary of packages required on various systems

Contribute

Translations

If you want to submit a translation for this project, here are the steps:

1. Install all relevant dependencies
2. Fork this repository on GitHub
3. git clone http://github.com/<USERNAME>/xprintidle-ng && cd xprintidle-ng
4. ./bootstrap && ./configure && make
5. The template file will be in po/xprintidle-ng.pot
6. Based on the template file, write your po file, e.g.: la.po for Latin
7. Put la.po in the po folder in the repository
8. git add po/la.po
9. git commit -a -m "Added Latin translation" && git push
10. Open a pull request against this repository

You can also translate doc/xprintidle-ng.texi; put these translations in an appropriately named file, e.g.: doc/xprintidle-ng.la.texi.

Languages translated so far:

• English