How can I determine the display idle time from Python in Windows, Linux, and MacOS?

Question

I would like to know how long it's been since the user last hit a key or moved the mouse - not just in my application, but on the whole "computer" (i.e. display), in order to guess whether they're still at the computer and able to observe notifications that pop up on the screen.

I'd like to do this purely from (Py)GTK+, but I am amenable to calling platform-specific functions. Ideally I'd like to call functions which have already been wrapped from Python, but if that's not possible, I'm not above a little bit of C or ctypes code, as long as I know what I'm actually looking for.

On Windows I think the function I want is GetLastInputInfo, but that doesn't seem to be wrapped by pywin32; I hope I'm missing something.

Answer 1

Gajim does it this way on Windows, OS X and GNU/Linux (and other *nixes):

1. Python wrapper module (also includes Windows idle time detection code, using GetTickCount with ctypes);
2. Ctypes-based module to get X11 idle time (using XScreenSaverQueryInfo, was a C module in old Gajim versions);
3. C module to get OS X idle time (using HIDIdleTime system property).

Those links are to quite dated 0.12 version, so you may want to check current source for possible further improvements and changes.