Locking and Idle

Super+L, or Desk > Lock Screen, locks the screen. Every window and the menu bar are hidden, the desktop stays, and a GEM dialog asks for your password, with a bar of its own across the top saying the screen is locked, and the time.

Return or Unlock checks the password with PAM, as logging in does (the gemwm-lock service, in /etc/pam.d, installed with GemWM). A wrong one is a GEM alert, and anything else PAM says, a fingerprint reader asking for a finger say, shows in the dialog. Nothing reaches the windows behind it: not the keys, not the pointer, not the key bindings.

By itself

• When you’ve gone: after lock minutes with no input it locks, and after screen-off minutes (or a minute after locking) the screens go off. Any key or the pointer brings them back. A program that asks, a video player say, holds both off while it plays.
• Before the computer sleeps, closing the lid say: GemWM has logind wait while it locks, so it wakes up locked. loginctl lock-session locks too.

[idle]
lock = 10              # minutes idle until it locks; 0 never
screen-off = 15        # minutes until the screens go off; 0 never
locker = gemwm-lock    # or another locker

Apply changes with gemwm msg reload-config.

If something goes wrong

If the locker dies while the screen’s locked, the screen stays locked, showing only the desktop, and GemWM starts the locker again a moment later.

GemWM speaks the Wayland screen locking protocol (ext-session-lock-v1), so other lockers work too (locker = swaylock), and the idle one (ext-idle-notify-v1), for tools like swayidle. From a script:

gemwm msg lock          # lock now
gemwm msg lock-status   # {"locked":true,"shown":true}