Make i3lock hip again

I have been using the i3 window manager for almost 7-8 months now and I really like the peace that comes with it. Its a tiling window manager which (in some way) pushes one to have a more managed workspace.

Sharing my i3 configuration is probably a post of its own, but today I want to share my i3lock wrapper script. Generally i3lock locks the screen and puts a white wallpaper (rathar ugly white wallpaper). The script below takes a screenshot of the screen, blurs it and then uses it as a lock screen wallpaper. It gives a pretty cool effect

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#!/bin/bash

# take the current screenshot
scrot/tmp/screen_locked.png

# add blur to the image
convert /tmp/screen_locked.png -blur 0x8 /tmp/screen_locked_blurred.png

# delete the original image, we dont want anyone looking at this
rm /tmp/screen_locked.png

# lock the screen
i3lock -i /tmp/screen_locked_blurred.png

Adding this script to the path and binding it with a key combination ($mod + shift + ctrl + l in my case) makes life quite easy.

The keybinding can be added to ~/.config/i3/config file as follows

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bindsym $mod+Ctrl+Shift+l exec "lock" # lock is the script from earlier