How to tell if user is actively typing in Linux?

Question

I'd like to write a little script to ask me what I'm doing at regular intervals, but I'd like it not to grab focus if I'm in the middle of writing an email or filling in a password. The two options I've come up with are (1) notify-send/pynotify which lets me pop up a notification bubble in the top right of my screen which is perfect, but can't seem to include a text entry field; and (2) zenity and similar which bring up a window with a text field, but steal focus when they do.

Answer 1

If in X, here is a post that contains a script monitors /dev/input/event:

• https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=691751

The important command is:

sudo hexdump -e '48/1 "%x " "\n"' /dev/input/event1 | awk '( $29 == 1) { print "PRESS: " $13 } ( $29 == 0 ) { print "RELEASE: " $13 }'

Naturally, you need to have sudo permissions, otherwise it will become what that post suggests...

Answer 2

Aha, xprintidle seems to be the answer to my woes. It tracks mouse movement as well as keyboard, but gives idle time in milliseconds so seems good enough.

http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~henoch/text/xprintidle.html

sleep 10 
echo waiting for me not to be busy
while [ "$(xprintidle)" -lt 3000 ]; do sleep 1; done
echo interrupting
(unset WINDOWID; zenity --title "Annoyer" --entry --text "Are we there yet?")