Swaylock-effects is a fork of swaylock which adds built-in screenshots and image manipulation effects like blurring. It's inspired by i3lock-color, although the feature sets aren't perfectly overlapping.

This repository (jirutka/swaylock-effects) is a fork of mortie/swaylock-effects which is no longer maintained.

swaylock \
	--screenshots \
	--clock \
	--indicator \
	--indicator-radius 100 \
	--indicator-thickness 7 \
	--effect-blur 7x5 \
	--effect-vignette 0.5:0.5 \
	--ring-color bb00cc \
	--key-hl-color 880033 \
	--line-color 00000000 \
	--inside-color 00000088 \
	--separator-color 00000000 \
	--grace 2 \
	--fade-in 0.2

The main new features compared to upstream swaylock are:

• --screenshots to use screenshots instead of an image on disk or a color
• --clock to show date/time in the indicator
  • Use --indicator to make the indicator always active
  • Use --timestr and --datestr to set the date/time formats (using strftime-style formatting)
• --submit-on-touch to use your touchscreen to submit a password. If you can unlock your device with anything else than your password, this might come helpful to trigger PAM's authentication process.
• --grace <seconds> to set a password grace period, so that the password isn't required to unlock until some number of seconds have passed.
  • Used together with --indicator, the indicator is always shown, even in the grace period.
  • Used together with --indicator-idle-visible, the indicator is only visible after the grace period.
  • By default, a key press, a mouse event or a touch event will unlock during the grace period. Use --grace-no-mouse to not unlock as a response to a mouse event, and --grace-no-touch to not unlock as a response to a touch event.
• --fade-in <seconds> to make the lock screen fade in.
• --indicator-image <path> to display an image inside the indicator.
• --text-clear <string>, --text-caps-lock <string>, --text-ver <string>, and --text-wrong <string> to change the texts displayed inside the indicator.
• Various effects which can be applied to the background image
  • --effect-blur <radius>x<times>: Blur the image (thanks to yvbbrjdr's fast box blur algorithm in i3lock-fancy-rapid)
  • --effect-pixelate <factor>: Pixelate the image.
  • --effect-scale <scale>: Scale the image by a factor. This can be used to make other effects faster if you don't need the full resolution.
  • --effect-greyscale: Make the image greyscale.
  • --effect-vignette <base>:<factor>: Apply a vignette effect (range is 0-1).
  • --effect-compose <position>;<size>;<gravity>;<path>: Overlay another image.
  • --effect-custom <path>: Load a custom effect from a C file or shared object.

New feature ideas are welcome as issues (though I may never get around to implement them), new feature implementations are welcome as pull requests :)

swaylock-effects continuously incorporates changes from the original swaylock. The following table shows the relation between the swaylock-effect and swaylock versions.

• Alpine Linux: swaylock-effects
• Arch Linux (AUR): swaylock-effects / swaylock-effects-git
• Fedora (Copr): swaylock-effects
• FreeBSD: swaylock-effects
• Guix: swaylock-effects
• Nix: swaylock-effects

The original mortie/swaylock-effects (now unmaintained) has been packaged for:

• Fedora (Copr): swaylock-effects (thanks to Edd Salkield)
• Gentoo (GURU overlay): swaylock-effects
• T2 SDE: swaylock-effects

Install dependencies:

• meson *
• wayland
• wayland-protocols *
• libxkbcommon
• cairo
• gdk-pixbuf2 **
• pam (optional)
• scdoc (optional: man pages) *
• git *
• openmp (if using a compiler other than GCC)

*Compile-time dep

**Optional: required for background images other than PNG

Run these commands:

meson build
ninja -C build
sudo ninja -C build install

On systems without PAM, you need to suid the swaylock binary:

sudo chmod a+s /usr/local/bin/swaylock

Swaylock will drop root permissions shortly after startup.

--effect-blur <radius>x<times>: Blur the image.

<radius> is a number specifying how big the blur is, <times> is a number which specifies essentially how high quality the blur is (i.e how closely the effect will resemble a true gaussian blur).

--effect-pixelate <factor>: Pixelate the image.

<factor> is the amount of pixelation; a value of 10 will make each 10x10 square of pixels the same color.

--effect-scale <scale>: Scale the image by a factor.

This effect scales the internal buffer. This has a few uses:

• Use --effect-scale in combination with --scaling to create a zoom effect: --efect-scale 1.1 --scaling center
• Speed up other effects by making the resolution smaller: with --effect-scale 0.5 --effect-blur 7x5 --effect-scale 2, swaylock-effect needs to blur only 1/4 as many pixels.

--effect-greyscale: Make the displayed image greyscale.

--effect-vignette <base>:<factor>: Apply a vignette effect. Base and factor should be between 0 and 1.

--effect-compose "<position>;<size>;<gravity>;<path>": Overlay another image to your lock screen.

• <position>: Optional. The position on the screen to put the image, as <x>,<y>.
  • Can be a percentage (10%,10%), a number of pixels (20,20), or a mix (30%,40).
  • A negative number indicates that number of pixels away from the right/bottom instead of from the top/left; -1,-1 would be the bottom right pixel.
  • Default: 50%,50%.
• <size>: Optional. The size of the image on the screen, as <w>x<h>.
  • Can be a percentage (10%x10%), a number of pixels (20x20), or a mix (30%x40).
  • If the width is -1, the width is figured out based on the height and aspect ratio.
  • If the height is -1, the height is figured out based on the width and aspect ratio.
  • Default: The size of the image file.
• <gravity>: Optional. Determine which point of the image is placed at <position>.
  • Possible values: center, north, south, west, east, northwest, northeast, southwest, southeast`.
  • With a <gravity> of northwest, <position> gives the location of the top/left corner of the image; with southeast, <position> controls the bottom/right corner, center controls the middle of the image, etc.
  • Default: center if no <position> is given; otherwise, intelligently decide a gravity based on position (10,10 -> northwest, -10,10 -> northeast, etc).
• <path>: The path to an image file.

This command requires swaylock-effects to be compiled with gdk-pixbuf2. It supports all image formats gdk-pixbuf2 supports; on my system, that's png, jpeg, gif, svg, bmp, ico, tiff, wmf, ani, icns, pnm, qtif, tga, xbm and xpm.

--effect-custom <path>: Load a custom effect from a shared object.

The .so must export a function void swaylock_effect(uint32_t *data, int width, int height) or a function uint32_t swaylock_pixel(uint32_t pix, int x, int y, int width, int height).