Linux – Have certain keys pass through lockscreen

linuxscreen-lockx11xorg

I'd like to have certain keys (mainly media keys) reach my windowmanager even if my lockscreen is active. This way, I could control my media player even when my screen is locked.

As far as I can see, this is probably only possible if the screen locker supports this: Once the screen locker has grabbed the keyboard pointer away from the root window, there seems to be no way of receiving keypress events.

Does anyone know any screen lockers supporting such a thing? Or any other way of listening to keypresses while a lockscreen is active?

Thank a lot,

Lukas

Best Answer

I figured something out: listening for raw keypresses is possible even when the keyboard focus is grabbed away by a screen locker. The downside is that with raw keypresses, you have to manually track the state of the modifier keys, but that seems to work pretty well.

I built a small hotkey daemon based on this idea which allows to execute commands even while the screen is locked. If anyone is interested, you can find it here: https://github.com/tinloaf/lhkd

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Security – Lock Screen with slock After Certain Time

_{(I assume you mean after a certain amount of time with no activity)}

slock doesn't have that capability built-in; you have to use another tool that watches X and tracks how long there's been no activity. For example, using xautolock with a delay of 15 minutes:

$ xautolock -time 15 -locker slock

Linux – X11 forwarding through SSH

I guess this is not really an answer, but it might be a starting point.

I started a bunch of extra X servers using xinit like so;

xinit -- :1 tty3   
xinit -- :2    
xinit -- :3 tty5    
xinit -- :4

It looks like I can even start multiple gnome3 and xfce sessions on different virtual displays

startx -- :2  tty3   
startx -- :3  tty4

And now I can start stuff in those sessions by exporting the DISPLAY var export DISPLAY=:3 and then select it using the Ctrl-Alt-F2, F3 etc

However I have absolutely no idea what I am doing (am I switching DISPLAY, session, console, or tty?), its just pretty cool, as you say... ;-)

[tomh@workstation001 ~]$ export DISPLAY=:4
[tomh@workstation001 ~]$ google-chrome

Best Answer

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Security – Lock Screen with slock After Certain Time

Linux – X11 forwarding through SSH

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