Safe Eyes

Protect your eyes from eye strain using this simple and beautiful, yet extensible break reminder.

Visit the official site: https://slgobinath.github.io/safeeyes/ for more details.

Safe Eyes command-line arguments

Usage:
  safeeyes [OPTION…]

Help Options:
  -h, --help                 Show help options
  --help-all                 Show all help options
  --help-gapplication        Show GApplication options

Application Options:
  -a, --about                show the about dialog
  -s, --settings             show the settings dialog
  -t, --take-break           take a break now
  -b, --short-break          take a short break now
  -l, --long-break           take a long break now
  -d, --disable              disable the currently running Safe Eyes instance
  -e, --enable               enable the currently running Safe Eyes instance
  -q, --quit                 quit the running Safe Eyes instance and exit
  --status                   print the status of running Safe Eyes instance and exit
  --debug                    start Safe Eyes in debug mode
  --version                  show program's version number and exit

Installation guide

Safe Eyes is available on the official repositories of many popular the distributions.

It is also available in Ubuntu PPA, Arch AUR and Python PyPI. You can choose any installation source and install on any Linux system with Python 3.

Ubuntu, Linux Mint and other Ubuntu Derivatives

The Official PPA for Safe Eyes hosts the latest (as much as allowed by dependencies) version of Safe Eyes for Ubuntu 22.04 and above.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:safeeyes-team/safeeyes
sudo apt update
sudo apt install safeeyes

On older versions of Ubuntu, an older version of Safe Eyes is available on the official repositories.

sudo apt install safeeyes

Arch

yay -S safeeyes

Gentoo

sudo emerge -av x11-misc/safeeyes

Debian

sudo apt-get install safeeyes

Fedora

You can install with pip

pip3 install --user safeeyes

For smartpause in Wayland, install the python3-pywayland package (in case the installer does not automatically install it as a dependency). For smart pause plugin in X11, you may have to install the latest xprintidle from: alonid/xprintidle.

Alternatively, use the Flatpak version, which comes preinstalls with dependencies and features automatic updates.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed

sudo zypper refresh
sudo zypper install safeeyes

Alpine Linux

sudo apk add safeeyes

Chrome OS

Enable the Linux container (which is actually Debian), and install Safe Eyes with

sudo apt install safeeyes

While no tray icon is available, if you run the app, it will function in the background and will show breaks as usual. You can also change the settings by clicking on the Safe Eyes icon from the menu while the app is running, or by running the command safeeyes -s.

Flatpak

Warning: Many plugins and features don't work well in the flatpak. We recommend that you use one of the native packages listed above. Flatpak-only bugs should be reported at https://github.com/flathub/io.github.slgobinath.SafeEyes.

flatpak install flathub io.github.slgobinath.SafeEyes

Other Linux & Run from source

Ensure to meet the following dependencies:

• gir1.2-notify-0.7
• gir1.2-gtk-4.0
• ffmpeg or pipewire (any of them works)
• python3 (>= 3.10.0)
• python3-gi
• python3-babel
• python3-croniter
• python3-packaging
• python3-xlib (required on x11)
• Optional: Either python3-pywayland (provides smartpause in Wayland) or xprintidle (provides smartpause in x11).

To install Safe Eyes from PyPI:

sudo pip3 install safeeyes

After installation, restart your system to update the icons,

To run from source:

git clone https://github.com/slgobinath/safeeyes.git
cd SafeEyes
python3 -m safeeyes

Safe Eyes installers install the required icons to /usr/share/icons/hicolor. When you run Safe Eyes from source without, some icons may not appear.

Note that on Wayland, this may still not be enough to get window icons working properly, as Wayland requires the .desktop file to match the running application, which is hard to do when running from source. If at all possible, prefer using an installed package.

Install in a virtual environment

Some Linux systems like CentOS do not have matching dependencies available in their repository (of course you can use the flatpak there). In such systems, you can install and use Safe Eyes in a Python virtual environment.

1. Install the necessary dependencies for CentOS 7

   sudo yum install python3-devel cairo cairo-devel cairomm-devel libjpeg-turbo-devel pango pango-devel pangomm pangomm-devel gobject-introspection-devel cairo-gobject-devel
   

2. Create a virtual environment in your home folder

   mkdir ~/safeeyes
   cd ~/safeeyes/
   
   python3 -m venv venv
   source venv/bin/activate
   pip3 install safeeyes
   

3. Start Safe Eyes from the terminal

   cd ~/safeeyes & source venv/bin/activate
   python3 -m safeeyes
   

For more details, please check the issue: #329

This method has the same caveats about icons/window icons as running from source.

Features

• Remind you to take breaks with exercises to reduce RSI
• Disable keyboard during breaks
• Notification before and after breaks
• Smart pause if system is idle
• Multi-screen support
• Customizable user interface
• Middle-click the tray icon to start a short break
• Command-line arguments to control the running instance
• Customizable using plug-ins

Third-party Plugins

Thirdparty plugins are available at another GitHub repository: safeeyes-plugins. More details about how to write your own plugin and how to install third-party plugin are available there.

Local development

When adding new translatable strings in the source code, make sure to run python validate_po.py --extract to add them to the translation template. You will need to install python3-polib for this.

Examples for translatable strings are _("This is a string") in Python code, or <property name="label" translatable="yes">This is a label</property> in Glade/xml files.

To ensure the new strings are well-formed, you can use python validate_po.py --validate.

To ensure that the coding and formatting guidelines are followed, install ruff and run ruff check and ruff format --check to check for issues, as well as ruff check --fix and ruff format to autofix them.

To ensure that any types are correct, install mypy and run mypy safeeyes.

To ensure that the tests still pass, install pytest and run pytest.

The last four checks are also run in CI, so a PR must pass all the tests for it to be mmerged.

It is also possible to use dependency groups to install the needed dependencies. When using a new enough version of pip, run pip install --group types to install all dependencies to run the type check. The available dependency groups can be found in the pyproject.toml file.

How to Release?

0. Run update-po.sh to generate new translation files (which will be eventually updated by translators). Commit and push the changes to the master branch.
1. Checkout the latest commits from the master branch
2. Run python3 -m safeeyes to make sure nothing is broken
3. Update the Safe Eyes version. Run ./update-version.sh "version.number.number" "New version with shiny new feature". To manually change the version number, update the following places (Open the project in VSCode and search for the current version):
   • pyproject.toml
   • pyproject.toml
   • io.github.slgobinath.SafeEyes.metainfo.xml
4. Update the changelog (for Ubuntu PPA release). This is automated if you use the ./update-version.sh script mentioned above, but you may want to manually add more lines to describe what's new in this release.
5. Commit the changes to master
6. Create a pull-request from master to release
7. Merge the PR to release with merge commit (Important to merge with merge commit)

How you can help improving translation of Safe Eyes

First check if translations for your language are already available on Weblate, which is the cloud based translation platform we use.

• If the language is already there, feel free to add new translations or improve the existing ones.
• If it is not there, please open an issue in Github so that we can add your language to Weblate.

License

GNU General Public License v3