Support micropauses as well as typing breaks in keyboard preferences

[Aaron Whitehouse]

Binary package hint: gnome-control-center

I think that the typing breaks feature in Gnome should allow the user to set up micropauses and typing breaks.

Other RSI/OOS prevention tools (for example, Workpace) suggest a micropause of 10 seconds every, say, 3 minutes and then a Rest Break of 5 mins or more every, say, half an hour. Incidentally, Workpace suggests exercises during these Rest Breaks.

I suffer from RSI quite badly and I find that regular micropauses make a much bigger difference than the longer breaks. I believe that is true for a lot of people, but I cannot point to any research on it; it is certainly what we are told by our office OOS prevention person.

An easy way to provide this feature would be to repeat the same options that we currently have, so that the tab read:

Lock Screen to enforce typing breaks:
[ X ] Micropause of [10] seconds every [3] minutes
[ X ] Rest break of [5] minutes every [15] minutes (this is what we already have)

At a later stage, it would be great to have exercise suggestions during those breaks, but that is a different, long-term feature request.

This really belongs upstream, but I can't find my Gnome Bugzilla details at the moment.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug, that's known upstream, you can read about it on http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=127419

[Aaron Whitehouse (aaron-whitehouse)]

Note that "Workrave" is a Free program available in the repositories that is brilliant for this purpose.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

typing break has been deprecated in GNOME3, closing that bug