Closing the lid

What happens when you close the lid

If agent sessions are running, the laptop keeps working with the lid shut: the screen goes off, the work carries on, and a VPN stays connected. If nothing is running, the laptop suspends, as it always did. You do not switch between the two; Rime measures which case applies each time.

Three things still put the machine to sleep with the lid shut, and each says that it fired: it got too hot, the battery reached its floor, or you told it to. Before a heat or battery suspend, Rime checkpoints the running sessions.

What counts as live work

An agent session in Rime’s agent runtime: a coding agent such as claude or codex started through rime agent (or its shortcut, a). One or more sessions keeps the machine awake. Zero sessions means it suspends.

A program in an ordinary terminal is not counted. To keep the machine awake whatever is running, pin it on (see below).

If Rime cannot ask the agent runtime (it is not running, or the query fails), the machine suspends, because a laptop that stays awake on an unanswered question overheats in a bag. rime lid status says why. The agent runtime runs by default because Rime Remote starts it; if you turned Rime Remote off for your account, run rime agent enable to keep the runtime.

The commands

rime lid              # the same as rime lid status
rime lid status       # what the policy sees, and what it would do now
rime lid explain      # the same decision, with every input that produced it
rime lid plan         # what would be powered down on a close. Applies nothing
rime lid report       # what the last closed period did
rime lid pin          # print the current setting
rime lid pin on       # keep working on every close, whatever is running
rime lid pin off      # always suspend on a close
rime lid pin auto     # let the measurement decide again (the default)

None of them needs root. status, explain, plan and report take --json. The pin is saved in ~/.config/rime/lid.toml.

In Rime Shell

• Quick Settings, on the Dashboard’s Home page, has a Lid stays awake tile. Tapping it switches between on and auto. The tile is lit when you have pinned it on; the line under it says what the machine is doing.
• Settings, System, Closing the Lid shows the same decision, the last closed period, and the off setting, which the tile cannot select.

Caffeine is a different thing. It keeps the screen from dimming, blanking and locking while you work, and does nothing about the lid.

The guards

The decision is not taken once. With the lid shut, Rime re-checks every 30 seconds by default:

Guard	Fires when
thermal	the hottest sensor comes within 15 °C of its own firmware critical temperature (or reaches 95 °C, for a sensor with no critical temperature)
thermal-unreadable	a sensor is present and will not report
thermal-no-sensor	the machine reports no temperature at all
battery	the charge reaches 20 %
battery-unreadable	the battery is present and will not say how full it is

Every guard checkpoints the live sessions, then suspends. The floor is 20 % rather than lower so that there is enough charge left to resume and finish.

What turns off, and what stays on

With the lid shut and work running, Rime turns off:

• the panel;
• the keyboard backlight, restored to its previous level when you open the lid;
• Bluetooth, and only if it was on (restored when you open the lid);
• maintenance timers that would otherwise wake the machine: update and cache refresh timers, raid-check and updatedb.

It never touches the shell or the agent runtime. rime lid plan lists what it would do on your machine, and what it cannot do and why.

The VPN

There is no special VPN handling. The tunnel stays up because the machine does not suspend, so the network never gets the signal to go to sleep. Wi-Fi power saving can still drop a long-lived tunnel, so Rime turns Wi-Fi power saving off for the closed period. That costs battery, and it is on by default.

After you open the lid

rime lid report

It says how long the machine stayed up and why, which guard ended the period if one did, the peak temperature, what was powered down, what could not be done, and a VPN timeline sampled across the period. The same summary goes to the journal:

journalctl -t rime-lid

Settings

Your settings are in ~/.config/rime/lid.toml; the machine’s are in /etc/rime/lid.toml. Yours win where both exist, and rime lid status names the file it used.

enabled            = true      # false: stock behaviour, the feature does nothing
pin                = "auto"    # "auto", "on" or "off"
battery_floor_pct  = 20
thermal_headroom_c = 15.0      # degrees below the firmware's critical temperature
thermal_ceiling_c  = 95.0      # only for a sensor with no critical temperature
require_thermal    = true      # a machine with no sensor may not stay awake
poll_secs          = 30

[powerdown]
display             = true
keyboard_backlight  = true
bluetooth           = true
wifi_powersave_off  = true     # costs power; keeps the VPN steadier

The driver is rime-lid.service, enabled in the image. To see what it would decide without letting it act:

rime lid watch --once --dry-run

How it works

Rime holds a logind lid-switch inhibitor while there is live work, and drops it as soon as there is none. It never changes HandleLidSwitch=. If the service crashes, the inhibitor goes with it, and the laptop suspends on a lid close like a stock install. To see who holds an inhibitor:

systemd-inhibit --list

Limits

• Docked. With an external display connected, logind applies its docked rule (by default, ignore the lid) before any of this. The tile says docked when that is the case. The heat and battery guards still suspend.
• Not measured yet: the saving. Nobody has measured how much less power the machine draws with the lid shut and work running than with it open. The report records the charge at close and the last charge seen, but the open-lid baseline has not been taken.
• A desktop has no lid; the service says so and does nothing.

On a machine installed from the v2.1.0 ISO

This page describes current Rime images. A machine installed from the v2.1.0 ISO runs an older APEX-OS image, with the apex command, until its first update. See Install Rime.