I like to put my displays to powersave/standby mode when I leave the computer for a while. It would be ok if it weren't for oversensitive mouse. Sometimes the driver reads in some movement that's not visible to the naked eye (the cursor, that is) and it breaks the power save. It would wait for another 10 minutes before going back to its standby.

My workaround is the following script bound to C-S-q:

xlock -startCmd 'xset dpms 2 2 2' -endCmd 'xset dpms 600 1200 1300' -mode blank -echokeys -timeelapsed +usefirst

By using xset I set the values to 2 seconds each before going to standby. It's not nice, anyway. Sometimes there are cool fortunes that I want to read before typing in the password. I could keep the cursor moving but it's cludgy. (By the way, xlock's option mousemotion doesn't help -- it just hides the cursor but the displays fire up nevertheless.)

So the question: is there a way to make displays go standby and stay there until a keyboard key is pressed? I'm running gentoo and recent Xorg, but I hope the answer doesn't have to be distro-specific.

Basically the answer can be as simple as how to enable/disable mouse within command line? It think that would do the job if DPMS doesn't know the idea.