screenlocker

My lock screen is a pixelated view of the current screen:

Here is how it’s done.

First, you need to install scrot, imagemagick and i3lock:

sudo pacman -Sy scrot imagemagick i3lock

Then, place this script somewhere in your $PATH (~/.bin is a good place):

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# first take a screenshot of the current screen
scrot /tmp/screen.png
# make it small then big again
convert /tmp/screen.png -scale 20% -scale 1000% -resize 1920x1200! /tmp/screen.png
# lock the screen with this pixelated image
i3lock -i /tmp/screen.png

The last step is to bind a shortcut that calls this script. I use Super-$, and because I use Awesome WM, the code looks like this:

awful.key({ modkey,      }, "$", function () awful.util.spawn("lock.sh") end,
        {description = "lock screen", group = "utils"}),

To unlock, directly type your user password.

~Nico