xscreensaver

I'm not a big fan of screensavers since they tend to either look rubbish or use up lots of processing power, but I figured I needed something to lock the screen whilst I'm away. After a little experimenting with xlockmore, I figured it probably wasn't worth going against the norm and installed xscreensaver.

My biggest gripe with xscreensaver is that ugly screen you get when you go to unlock it. It is truly unpleasant. However I found out that you can change that by editing /etc/X11/app-defaults/XScreenSaver. I'm not sure if you can do it on a user level by editing ~/.xscreensaver.

Here's the relevant section. Basically I just changed all of the colours to black and white and removed the "XScreensaver vX.Y. This display is locked" text. It looks much better than before, although I couldn't figure out how to get rid of the xscreensaver logo.

! Resources for the password and splash-screen dialog boxes of
! the "xscreensaver" daemon.
!
!*Dialog.headingFont: *-times-bold-r-*-*-*-180-*-*-*-iso8859-1
*Dialog.headingFont: *-helvetica-bold-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-iso8859-1
*Dialog.bodyFont: *-helvetica-bold-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-iso8859-1
*Dialog.labelFont: *-helvetica-bold-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-iso8859-1
*Dialog.buttonFont: *-helvetica-bold-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-iso8859-1
*Dialog.dateFont: *-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-80-*-*-*-iso8859-1
*Dialog.foreground: #FFFFFF
*Dialog.background: #000000
*Dialog.Button.foreground: #000000
*Dialog.Button.background: #000000
!*Dialog.Button.background: #D6D6D6
!*Dialog.Button.pointBackground: #EAEAEA
!*Dialog.Button.clickBackground: #C3C3C3
*Dialog.text.foreground: #FFFFFF
*Dialog.text.background: #000000
*passwd.thermometer.foreground: #FF0000
*passwd.thermometer.background: #000000
*Dialog.topShadowColor: #000000
*Dialog.bottomShadowColor: #000000
*Dialog.logo.width: 210
*Dialog.logo.height: 210
*Dialog.internalBorderWidth: 0
*Dialog.borderWidth: 0
*Dialog.shadowThickness: 0

!*passwd.heading.label: XScreenSaver %s
*passwd.heading.label:
!*passwd.body.label: This display is locked.
*passwd.body.label:
*passwd.user.label: User:
*passwd.passwd.label: Password:
*passwd.passwdFont: *-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-iso8859-1
*passwd.thermometer.width: 8