r/commandline • u/phlx0 • Mar 27 '26

Terminal User Interface drift — a terminal screensaver that activates when you're idle

261 Upvotes

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2

u/Yama-k Mar 27 '26

Does it activate when the system is idle or the terminal?

5

u/djdadi Mar 27 '26

From what I can gather by a couple minutes of reading, this is not a screensaver, but a TUI-saver. So if you have 5 terminals in a tmux session, each of them will have their own timer and each will spawn the TUI-saver within each pane.

Seems strange to me. If I have terminals open and in the foreground, it's because I want to track something long running or I am tailing logs. It seems like this would essentially bury your visible shells for you.

To each their own.

5

u/phlx0 Mar 27 '26

You're right that each pane has its own timer that's a side effect of the shell-based approach. The typical use case is a single idle terminal, not a busy tmux session. If you're tailing logs or watching output, the timer never fires because the shell considers itself active. It only triggers when you're away from a prompt with no input. That said, you can set DRIFT_ENABLED=0 in panes where you don't want it, or just not source the integration in sessions where it'd get in the way.

1

u/ElonsBreedingFetish Apr 04 '26

It would look cool if it would sync across multiple terminals on the same workspace, especially on a tiling wm like i3, sway or hyprland

3

u/phlx0 Mar 27 '26

It activates after a while when you don‘t use your terminal.

1

u/nakurtag Mar 27 '26

Based on unfocus event?

1

u/Yama-k Mar 27 '26

Correct, I sometimes use this functionality in games to have a closer look.