How to detect idle time in JavaScript elegantly?

Question

Is it possible to detect \"idle\" time in JavaScript?
My primary use case probably would be to pre-fetch or preload content.

Idle time:

Answer 1

I wrote a simple jQuery plugin that will do what you are looking for.

https://github.com/afklondon/jquery.inactivity

$(document).inactivity( {
    interval: 1000, // the timeout until the inactivity event fire [default: 3000]
    mouse: true, // listen for mouse inactivity [default: true]
    keyboard: false, // listen for keyboard inactivity [default: true]
    touch: false, // listen for touch inactivity [default: true]
    customEvents: "customEventName", // listen for custom events [default: ""]
    triggerAll: true, // if set to false only the first "activity" event will be fired [default: false]
});

The script will listen for mouse, keyboard, touch and other custom events inactivity (idle) and fire global "activity" and "inactivity" events.

Hope this helps :)