Disable the bundled afk-watcher but run server and window

[Game4Move78]

Is there any way to disable the bundled idle watcher? Will there be any issues if I run the ActivityWatch aw-watcher-afk at the same time?

I'd like to use the keyboard / mouse method provided by ActivityWatch for monitoring idle time. I added a PR that changes the input listener to use evdev or libinput so it should work for Wayland. I am not sure if using awatcher with ActivityWatch's aw-watcher-afk will have issues. You recommend disabling aw-watcher-afk in the README.

[2e3s]

Will there be any issues if I run the ActivityWatch aw-watcher-afk at the same time?

Yes, it would overlap, the data will likely be incorrect.

Is there any way to disable the bundled idle watcher?

I thought about that flexibility. Probably this way: branch
However, I'm not sure if you need to do it. If you use awatcher, you can equally rely on idle and window data collection (unless you have a specific issue in mind).

I'd like to use the keyboard / mouse method provided by ActivityWatch for monitoring idle time

What's wrong or incomplete with awatcher's idle time retrieval? It uses the method from the appropriate desktop environments, whether it's X11, or the detected specific Wayland implementations (example). I would suggest that it's better to rely on the builtin DE implementation which may cover more edge cases for that DE, rather than implement it on the low level.

[Game4Move78]

Awatchers idle implementation is perfect and complete. I agree the DE is better for detecting idle. Awatcher works very well on my Fedora 41 system. Thank you very much for your work and the contributors of this repo!

The low level implementation in that PR is for providing keyboard and mouse movements to aw-watcher-input on Wayland (pynput is X11 and XWayland only). For development I wanted to test if this caused the official aw-watcher-afk to work on Wayland as well, but since I use awatcher server, I wondered if I would always have to switch away from awatcher in order to experiment with Python implementations of aw-watcher-afk. Just wondered if this is already a feature, and I don't have a necessary use case. Thank you for answering my question!

It may be useful to have your idle and window watchers support toggling in general. To selectively disable window or idle watching if you don't want one of those recorded for a period, or want to selectively opt out of recording that data. Since neither are necessary for ActivityWatch. Also just in case these watchers deviate from this repo in the future and we need to disable them in awatcher for any reason it might be a useful feature. Feel free to close this issue if you disagree.