workrave-kick

A small daemon that monitors user idle status via the Wayland ext_idle_notify_v1 protocol and reports activity to Workrave over DBus.

Workrave's built-in idle detection does not work under Wayland compositors that implement ext_idle_notify_v1 (e.g. KDE Plasma ≥ 5.27, GNOME ≥ 44, sway, COSMIC). This daemon bridges the gap: it listens for idle/resumed events from the compositor and calls ReportActivity on the Workrave DBus interface so that Workrave's break timer stays accurate.

I made this for COSMIC desktop so that it would work with workrave.

How it works

Connects to the Wayland display and binds wl_seat and ext_idle_notifier_v1.
Registers an idle notification with a configurable timeout (default 3 s).
When the user goes idle the daemon stops sending activity reports.
When the user resumes, the daemon sends ReportActivity to Workrave every 2 s (configurable) until the next idle period.

Requirements

Go version

Go 1.21+
libwayland-client development headers (for cgo)
Dependencies are declared in go.mod:
- github.com/godbus/dbus/v5
- github.com/rajveermalviya/go-wayland/wayland

go mod tidy
go build -o workrave-kick .

Usage

Start Workrave first, then run the daemon:

# Go (after building)
./workrave-kick

The daemon retries the Workrave DBus connection up to 10 times (1 s apart) before giving up, so it is safe to start it alongside Workrave in an autostart script.

Command-line Options (Go version)

./workrave-kick [OPTIONS]

-n, --no-idle - Disable idle detection (always report active)
-d, --dbus-idle - Use DBus idle detection instead of Wayland (experimental, requires Mutter/GNOME)
--go-wayland - Use pure Go Wayland library (may not work on all compositors)
-h, --help - Show help message

Default behavior: Uses C libwayland-client via CGO for maximum compatibility with all Wayland compositors including COSMIC.

Implementation Details

The Go version now uses two implementations:

C libwayland-client (default): Uses CGO to call the native libwayland-client library. This works reliably on all Wayland compositors including COSMIC, KDE Plasma, GNOME, and Sway.
Pure Go (--go-wayland flag): Uses github.com/rajveermalviya/go-wayland library. This may not work on some compositors like COSMIC due to protocol compatibility issues.

Configuration

Timeouts are compile-time constants at the top of each source file:

Constant	Default	Meaning
`idleTime`	3 s	How long without input before declaring idle
`kickTime`	2 s	Interval between `ReportActivity` calls while active

Autostart

systemd user unit

# ~/.config/systemd/user/workrave-kick.service
[Unit]
Description=Workrave Wayland idle bridge
After=graphical-session.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/workrave-kick
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=graphical-session.target

systemctl --user enable --now workrave-kick.service

Security notes

The daemon:

Makes no network connections (Wayland socket and DBus are local IPC only).
Does not write to the filesystem.
Does not require elevated privileges.
Only calls org.workrave.CoreInterface.ReportActivity on the session DBus.

Credits

The credits are in the directory portedfrom that I found in a github issue somewhere that @ValdikSS had made. rcaelers/workrave#523 (comment)

penguinpowernz/workrave-kick

README