Raspberry Pi 4 - Screen Blanking manually via command line 2023

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This is how to disable screen blanking on Raspberry Pi in 2023. This would go in a crontab or can be manually run via the command line. I wanted my rpi screen to power off at night, then be on all day. Most guides seemed confusing, and raspi-config didn't seem to actually do screen blanking for some reason. This was my solution.

  • Tested on Raspberry Pi 4 (Jan 18, 2023)

Disable and Enable Screen Blanking on RPi 4

Enable screen blanking on rpi4 so screen will automatically sleep after a while 

export DISPLAY=:0; xset +dpms; xset s blank; xset s off; xset dpms force on

Disable screen blanking on rpi 4 so screen is always on 

export DISPLAY=:0;xset s noblank; xset s off; xset -dpms

Description of xset screen blanking commands on raspberry pi

  • xset s noblank
    • Sets the screen to not blank
  • xset s off
    • Sets the screensaver off (if applicable)
  • xset -dpms
    • Turns off Display Power Management (dpms won't trigger the screen to sleep)
  • xset +dpms
    • This forces Display Power Management to kick in and sleep the monitor after a while
  • xset dpms force on
    • (not sure) I think this is +dpms but also forces the monitor to turn on.

Auto start

This command does not persist reboots. To run on every boot, create a script and add it to your startup items in your GUI. Or add to crontab -e on startup. Or make a systemd startup script. rc.local may even work if you're lazy.

Disable RPi screen blanking in console

This section is for an older Pi, I haven't tested on Pi 4

If your screen goes black during command line after 30 minutes or so, you have screen blanking enabled most likely. If you want to turn it off:

Edit the file /etc/kbd/config Change these lines: 

BLANK_TIME=0
BLANK_DPMS=off
POWERDOWN_TIME=0


Troubleshooting

Allow 15 minutes with each setting to see if the screen goes/doesn't go blank in the way you want. There may be other things that blank your screen, like system settings in MATE or other DE's, so look there too.

  • Disable screen blanking in raspi-config
  • Disable screensaver app, and in settings uncheck DPMS
  • Check system settings (MATE or Lubuntu power settings etc)
  • export DISPLAY=:0 is only needed if you run it via crontab or SSH.

External Links

Screen Blanking - this helped me a ton

Disable screen blanking - includes with auto-start

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