Lid Guard

Lid Guard keeps a laptop awake when its lid is closed, allowing AI agents, builds, downloads, and other background jobs to continue without changing the system-wide lid policy.

Plugin

Field	Value
ID	8bury/lid-guard
Entries	Bar widget: lid-guard; shortcut: lid-guard-toggle; service: lid-guard-service

Requirements

Install systemctl, systemd-run, and systemd-inhibit from systemd, plus sleep from coreutils, on PATH. The active user session must use systemd-logind and have a working user service manager.

Usage

Add the lid-guard widget to a bar. Left-click the shield to toggle the mode; right-click it to refresh the detected state. A highlighted shield means the lid-close inhibitor is active.

To use the same toggle from the Control Center, add the lid-guard-toggle shortcut in Settings → Control Center → Shortcuts.

The service entry lid-guard-service owns the inhibitor and can also be controlled through IPC:

noctalia msg plugin 8bury/lid-guard:lid-guard-service all enable
noctalia msg plugin 8bury/lid-guard:lid-guard-service all disable
noctalia msg plugin 8bury/lid-guard:lid-guard-service all toggle
noctalia msg plugin 8bury/lid-guard:lid-guard-service all refresh

IPC

The enable, disable, and toggle events change the inhibitor state. refresh and status re-check the transient user service without changing it. IPC events take no payload.

Notes

Lid Guard makes no network requests and writes no files. It spawns systemctl, systemd-run, systemd-inhibit, and sleep as the current user. When enabled, it creates the transient user service noctalia-lid-guard.service; disabling the mode stops that service.

The inhibitor covers only handle-lid-switch. It does not prevent suspension requested by an idle daemon, a power menu, or another explicit command, and it does not modify logind.conf. The mode ends when the user session or user service manager stops. If Noctalia is unavailable, restore the normal lid behavior with:

systemctl --user stop noctalia-lid-guard.service