When we are working on a desktop monitor, the computer screen can be easily turned off by pressing the power on/off switch which is usually present on the front of the monitor. It also displays the power on or power off status of the monitor using a color LED. When the monitor is off, it shows the LED in red/orange color and when it is turned on, the LED glows in the blue/green color. Besides we can always turn off the monitor by cutting off the power supply to the monitor.
But no such feature is present for the laptop screens. There is no switch for toggling the computer monitor on or off. And obviously we cannot turn off the power supply for the monitor in the laptops. However, using a small tool called Monoff, we can turn off the PC screen whenever we want.
Monoff is a small command line interface tool. When we launch it by double-clicking on it, it instantly turns off the screen. But this is not all it can do. It also comes with a parameter for setting a delay before the monitor is turned off. We can do this by using the –delay switch. When we do not use this switch, the application sets 50 milliseconds as the default delay interval. But we can set s custom delay in the following manner:
monoff.exe --delay 5000
The above example, sets a delay of 5000 milliseconds (which is equal to 5 seconds).
There is another way to use Monoff for turning off the monitor whenever we want. In this method we can assign a hotkey to launch monoff.exe. For example, we can assign a hotkey F10 to turn off the screen. This hotkey launched Monoff and we can even set the delay parameter to turn off the monitor after some time.
You can download Monoff from https://github.com/t-mart/monoff.