blight : Backlight Idle Daemon for FreeBSD/KDE/Plasma/Wayland
Host: thinkpadt480s | Date: 2026-05-10 | Status: Deployed and running
blight is a backlight idle ‘daemon’ I made to use on KDE Plasma/Wayland on FreeBSD 15 because I needed something to dim the screen. It blanks the screen after a configurable idle timeout, suspends on battery after extended idle, and restores brightness on any input activity : no D-Bus, no logind, no powerdevil, no device polling. It is a shell script wrapping swayidle, which speaks the org_kde_kwin_idle Wayland protocol directly to KWin.
This is a rewrite. The original was a Python daemon that polled input devices directly. That approach had fundamental problems on FreeBSD and was replaced entirely with a sh wrapper around swayidle.