The One with the Thoughts of Frans

Workarounds for Turning Off Your DisplayPort Monitor

Sometimes you jot down a few quick notes for yourself without bothering to turn them into a blogpost that might be useful to others. This is one of those notes. First, I’ll introduce my computer monitor workflow as it’s been since time immemorial, also known as ’95 or ’96. Just like how I turn off lights I don’t use, I’ve always turned off my monitor when I wanted it. This has never been a problem, until in early 2015 I had to use DisplayPort for the first time. If you want an UltraHD monitor, which you do if you care even the tiniest bit about sharpness and clarity, you have to use DisplayPort.

But DisplayPort isn’t nice. Turning off your monitor is treated the same as disconnecting it. In Windows this means everything resets itself to some absurdly low resolution, whereas in Linux the consequences can be even worse (like having to SSH in from another computer to run an xrandr command to reactivate the monitor). This means you either face a colossal waste of energy or continuous annoyance at the fact that your monitor has turned itself off yet again. In my view monitor timeouts should be at least twenty minutes, just as a failsafe in the extremely unlikely event that you forgot to turn it off. Luckily I found two reasonable workarounds within the first week or two of having acquired my UHD monitor.

The first?

xset dpms force off

This has the same effect as your monitor timeout, only at your volition. I tend to find the blinking light on the monitor somewhat annoying, but this nevertheless remains your best bet to quickly turn the screen off as part of your regular workflow.

The second method consists of actually turning the monitor off. Besides getting rid of the blinking light I figure it saves just a tiny bit more electricity to boot. Which is useful if you want to keep your computer active, but not your monitor. For this method you have to switch to TTY (Ctrl + Alt + F1-6) before turning your monitor off. Then when you turn your monitor back on, X won’t know it’s been missing. Switch back with Ctrl + Alt + F7.

I’m still hopeful that there might simply be an xorg.conf setting I’ve overlooked, but in any case these workarounds serve their purpose. Note that xset dpms force off is also tremendously useful on laptops that don’t have a function key for turning off the screen. Standby often just isn’t what you want.

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