My LCD monitor's tricky to switch on and off. Not only is its power button in an odd place, but it's also small, unlit, and flush-mounted. That means I invariably hit Brightness or Menu when I'm head away from my desk for an extended period. But, no worries. Linux to the rescue...

The manual page for xset describes it modestly as the "user preference utility for X", and one of those preferences is monitor control.

xset q

for example will list your monitor's current settings, while

xset dpms force off

will turn it off. (DPMS. or Display Power Management Signaling, is more commonly known as Energy Star compliance.)


So by creating a keyboard shortcut to perform the command

sleep 1 && xset dpms force off

you can create a keyboard-based, power-saving, monitor switch. (Moving the mouse or hitting a key will reawaken it.)

In case you're wondering, sleep 1 forces the system to wait a second before executing xset. Keyboards send signals when keys are pressed and released, so without it the monitor would only switch off for as long as you held the key down!





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