Re: [dev] [slock] won't lock if unclutter grabbed mouse pointer

From: Markus Teich <markus.teich_AT_stusta.mhn.de>
Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2016 23:21:11 +0100

Andreas Doll wrote:
> By the way, xscreensaver successfully locks the screen, and prints
>
> couldn't grab pointer! (AlreadyGrabbed)
>
> and displays the verification window only upon keyboard activity. Without
> unlcutter this window appears also on mouse input.

Heyho Andreas,

This is probably because xscreensaver doesn't mind if the Pointer could not be
grabbed. However for screen lockers which are meant to be a security feature I
think it is a good idea to prevent *any* input except the password entry to
unlock the screen.

> Personally I'd prefer to have the hint in slocks manpage, as it took me some
> time to realize what's going on. The Debian maintainer chose to write a
> distro-specific manpage for slock - for now I'll report the behavior to him
> and let him decide whether he wants to include this.

I don't like the man-page approach. Documentation always looses synchronization
to the codebase, so my proposal would be to output a similar error message in
slock. The link from "slock: could not grab pointer" to `unclutter -grab` should
be easy enough to discover then.

By the way: Why are you using the `-grab` switch? According to the man page this
seems to be the old version. The developer probably noticed that grabbing the
pointer is not the best idea and implemented another method of hiding the
cursor.

> -grab means use the original method of grabbing the pointer […]

--Markus
Received on Fri Jan 15 2016 - 23:21:11 CET