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Use a pixelated version of your desktop as your lockscreen with i3lock

I decided it was time to spice up my lockscreen, I’ve been using the same old static picture for what feels like years now.

I’ve seen a lot of people use blurred and pixelated screenshots of their desktop and they do look pretty cool, so I decided to do the same thing myself. :)

I wrote a Bash script that uses scrot and imagemagick to take a screenshot of my desktop, pixelate the image, add the lock icon to it and lastly lock the screen using the newly created image.

#!/bin/bash

icon="$HOME/.config/i3/lock.png"
img="$HOME/.cache/i3lock.png"

scrot $img
# Pixelate image
convert $img -scale 10% -scale 1000% $img
# Blur image
#convert $img -blur 0x4 500% $img
convert $img $icon -gravity center -composite $img
i3lock -u -i $img

The lock icon I use can be found on the website Iconfinder.com here and I used the 256px version myself.

I also included the option to blur the image, which does look cool as well, but that operation is noticeably slower than pixelating the image.