The away screen: everything dark while the machine keeps working

The goal: leave an agent working for an hour and have the desk look like the PC is off, without suspending anything. The screens go black, the keyboard and the mouse go dark, and one key brings it all back.

The LEDs are declared, not savedCopy Anchor Link

modules/nixos/hardware/peripheral-rgb.nix declares my.rgb.peripherals (the host sets it in hosts/ex-b560m-v5/hardware.nix), applies the ON look at boot, and installs rgb-lights on|off.

The obvious design was "save an OpenRGB profile, go dark, load the profile back". Measured on 15/10/2026, it leaves both devices DARK. The EVision keyboard and the DeathAdder V2 keep their effect in firmware, and OpenRGB cannot read it back: it lists them as an empty Custom and an empty Direct, saves that, and loading it writes the emptiness. So the ON look is config, the same way the GPU's colour is (my.rgb.color, gpu-rgb.md).

The EVision has no Off mode, so its dark is Static with 000000.

The monitors are NOT turned offCopy Anchor Link

Two ways to really cut the panels were ruled out:

• DDC/CI 0xD6 (power mode): both panels advertise it, and setvcp D6 4 on the LG UltraGear dropped the DisplayPort link (card0-DP-2 went disconnected, Hyprland lost the monitor), and the panel stopped answering on its i2c bus, so D6 1 never arrived. Not even echo detect > /sys/class/drm/card0-DP-2/status brought it back: only its power button did. Never again.
• DPMS: toggling it under an active Sunshine capture reset the GPU engine on xe (sunshine.md).

So the screens stay on and show black, which is what the user asked for anyway.

Black is a Quickshell overlay that holds the keyboardCopy Anchor Link

Away.qml keeps the state and the IPC (qs ipc call away on|off|toggle), and away/AwayScreen.qml draws one black layer per monitor on the overlay layer, over the bar. Entering also holds the toasts (a toast would light the screen up) and runs rgb-lights off; leaving releases the hold and runs rgb-lights on.

A hold, not the DND switch (18/10/2026). The away screen used to write Notifs.dnd and restore it on the way out; when DND started persisting, dnd became read-only and both writes silently failed, so toasts reached the black screen. It now calls Notifs.hold(true) and hold(false): a counted, temporary hold that is never saved, and the toasts obey DND OR a hold. The user's DND is never touched, so a crash mid-away cannot leave it stuck on. Critical notifications still pierce, as they pierce DND. Tested live: no toast while away, the saved DND unchanged, a toast again after.

Three details carry the design:

• Exclusive keyboard focus. Every key lands on the overlay and is dropped, so a cat on the keyboard types nothing into the agent's terminal. Only Enter is handled, and it leaves. The mouse does nothing, and the cursor is blanked.
• Enter also lives in a Hyprland submap. Turning BOTH monitors off at their buttons drops both DisplayPort links, Quickshell falls back to a placeholder screen and recreates the overlay when they return, and the recreated windows came back WITHOUT keyboard focus: Enter went nowhere (16/10/2026). So entering also switches Hyprland to the away submap (keybinds.lua), where Enter is a compositor bind that needs no focus. The bind resets the submap itself, so a dead Quickshell cannot strand the keyboard in it. The QML handler stays for the normal case. wtype -k Return reaches the QML handler but NOT the bind (its virtual keyboard does not match Hyprland binds), so the bind is only provable with a real key.
• An idle inhibitor. hypridle's 5-min lock would otherwise draw the lock screen over the black and light the room. The overlay holds a Wayland idle inhibitor while it is up, which hypridle honours (its ignore_dbus_inhibit only covers D-Bus). The idle clock starts over on Enter, so walking away again still locks.
• No lock of its own. Enter alone brings the desktop back, by choice. If the room is not trusted, lock first (SUPER+L) and then go away.

It is reached from the moon pill next to the tray (it only turns the screen on, since the overlay covers it) and from "Away screen" in Vicinae, which waits half a second so the Enter that launched it is released before the overlay starts listening.

A Quickshell restart while away drops the overlay but not the LEDs: rgb-lights on fixes them.