Option to prevent sleep if task is running

[Sergio0694]

Description of the new feature/enhancement

On my machine, I have set the sleep time to 15 minutes. Sometimes (eg. when running long builds) I would just step away from it and let it work, but then come back with it being on standby and with the work just paused, which is pretty annoying. It would be nice if Terminal had an option to make it automatically prevent the machine going to sleep if there's some operation running in any tabs. This is pretty common for other applications/websites as well (eg. if you have Spotify playing music in Edge, your computer won't go to sleep).

Note

Tried searching for a similar issue and couldn't find one, so hopefully this is not a duplicate.

Proposed technical implementation details

PowerToys is already doing this in their "awake" feature, we could probably just do the same here?
Ie. SetThreadExecutionState?

[zadjii-msft]

I... don't hate this. But knowing when to do this would be tricky. We wouldn't necessarily want to always prevent sleep if the Terminal is running - we'd probably want to only do that if there's a child process running. That of course gets into weird edge cases - just running ssh from a shell (or heck, just cmd.exe from PowerShell) would then satisfy the heuristic here and would keep the PC alive.

Terminal doesn't currently track the tree of processes. We'll need to do that for #6549 though

[Sergio0694]

To give a real world use case scenario, I hit this when building https://github.com/microsoft/CsWinRT locally, which takes like half an hour. Started ./build.cmd, stepped away, came back after an hour and the PC had just gone to sleep after 10 minutes 🤦‍♂️

[DHowett]

This may be more suitable as a tool outside of Terminal, FWIW. I'm imagining something like macOS' caffeinate. You can caffeinate, and it will keep the machine awake until you press Ctrl+C, or you can caffeinate foo and it will keep the machine awake until foo exits.

[zadjii-msft]

that's actually really clever

[Sergio0694]

Would it perhaps make sense to have it just built-in into Terminal, so you can opt-in on a per-command basis?

[zadjii-msft]

have it just built-in into Terminal ... ?

Eh, honestly, in the name of trying to keep things as minimal as possible, probably not. However, there is PowerToys.Awake, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get the CLI to work

@crutkas help me out

[crutkas]

as of now, you'd need to turn off awake PowerToys can do it all via CLI but you'll want to turn it off inside PowerToys. We're working on improving this so the two can work side by side.

I grabbed the PID for Notepad in this example

PS C:\Users\crutkas> cd C:\Users\crutkas\AppData\Local\PowerToys
PS C:\Users\crutkas\AppData\Local\PowerToys> .\PowerToys.Awake.exe --pid 24384 --display-on true

soon as i closed out notepad, screen would turn off.

Good feedback for better documentation and see if we can't do CLI + PT open at same time work.

[crutkas]

@zadjii-msft i believe we can close this out as PT would be the team for this

[DHowett]

Thanks @crutkas!

@Sergio0694, if PowerToys Awake (CLI) doesn't quite fit your needs... we can all work together to make sure something does. 😄