Screen times out in i3 WM

Solution 1:

X.org has some basic screen saver functionality as well as energy saving features. Most likely either or both are responsible for the described behavior.

The settings for both can be viewed and changed with the xset tool (from the x11-xserver-utils package). xset q displays the current settings in the sections Screen Saver and DPMS (Energy Star).

You can disable the screen saver feature with:

xset s off

The power saving feature can be turned off with

xset -dpms

With these settings the screen should no longer turn off or blank automatically until you reboot your machine.

If your main concern is that 5 minutes are to short, you can also just raise the limits for that. To enable the screen saver only after 15 minutes (900 seconds) idle time, set the timeout accordingly with

xset s 900

To turn off the monitor after 20 minutes of idling run

xset dpms 0 0 1200

The two 0 values disable standby and suspend respectively, while 1200 sets the timeout for off to 20 minutes. (I usually do not use standby or suspend because there seems to be no difference between the three modes on modern TFT-displays.) Setting these values also enables DPMS, so you do not need to explicitly run xset +dpms.