OpenBSD X11 Setup
This is my personal setup for my openbsd laptop. I use i3 as my window manager and i3lock as a screen lock daemon.
xinitrc
xmodmap -e 'remove Lock = Caps\_Lock'
xmodmap -e 'keysym Caps\_Lock = Control\_L'
xmodmap -e 'add Control = Control\_L'I personally believe the home row is far to important for a caps lock key. So I remap it to left control. Makes bash and vim commands easier to type. I found the easiest program to use was xmodmap. Just keep in mind that in single user mode these settings will not take effect as X11 is never started.
export LANG="en\_US.UTF-8"
export MM\_CHARSET="UTF-8"I had issues with i3 overwriting locale settings. The solution was to set them in xinit instead of zshrc.
LOCK="i3lock -i /home/ehouse/Pictures/Wallpapers/lockscreen.png"
xautolock -locker "\$LOCK" -nowlock "\$LOCK" &I was playing around with slimlock originally but it is incompatible with FreeBSD. It requires specific libraries only available in the Linux kernel. Instead I decided to use i3lock and xautolock. Simple, but works well.
i3/config
I am only going to include code that wasn’t auto generated.
# start a terminal
bindsym \$mod+Return exec sakura
# Screen Lock
bindsym \$mod+q exec "xautolock -locknow"Instead of relying on i3-sensible-terminal I just wrote in sakura. It is gtk based terminal that doesn’t have an incredible dependency list like terminator or roxterm. I set a shortcut for locking the display. Xautolock and i3lock both support suspend and lock but I haven’t played around with it yet. I chose meta+q as it was not something I would accidentally hit.
exec --no-startup-id nitrogen –restorenitrogen works very well for setting X wallpapers. It requires that you start nitrogen and manually set the wallpaper though. It doesn’t support sideshow wallpapers but it probably wouldn’t be too hard to write a cronjob to do that.
I also remapped all of the movement keys over one to be more vimlike. I use G and V for horizontal and vertical splits. As much as I understand why they didn’t go with hjkl I don’t want to relearn the land positions. And finally I used i3menu for the menu bar. It comes with i3 and it is very easy to configure. It doesn’t put much load on the system when polling which is always a plus. Laptop battery life is precious.
That is my X11 setup in a nutshell. If anyone is interested in how I got something to work don’t hesitate and throw me an email. I always enjoy a good technical conversation.