idle-term-killer 0.2.0

Kill idle terminal shells after a configurable period of inactivity

idle-term-killer

Kills terminal shell tabs that have been idle for too long.

A shell tab is killed when its PTY has had no I/O for longer than the configured threshold and it has no running child processes. The idle time is read from /dev/pts/<N> atime — the same source used by the w command. Works with any terminal emulator that forks shell children (xfce4-terminal, gnome-terminal, konsole, alacritty, kitty, etc.).

Install

pip install idle-term-killer

Configure

Create ~/.config/idle-term-killer/config.toml:

[daemon]
idle_time_minutes = 5
check_interval_seconds = 60

# Optional — these are the defaults
[terminals]
emulators = ["xfce4-terminal", "gnome-terminal", "konsole", "xterm", "alacritty", "kitty", "tilix"]
shells = ["zsh", "bash", "sh", "fish", "dash"]

The daemon does nothing and exits cleanly if this file is absent.

Run as a systemd user service

idle-term-killer install

This copies the service file to ~/.config/systemd/user/ and enables it. The service starts automatically on login.

idle-term-killer status     # check service status
idle-term-killer uninstall  # stop and remove the service

One-shot / dry-run

idle-term-killer --dry-run --verbose   # show what would be killed
idle-term-killer                       # kill idle shells once and exit

Requirements

• Linux (uses /proc and /dev/pts)
• Python 3.11+
• psutil