04 — Screensaver, displays and menus

Three areas the operator named on 2026-10-04, as their own modules. Each sharpens a row of 01 and a question of 02.

The screensaver: idle, lock and display power

Measured on both workstations:

Idle and lock are three things wired by hand in the session's start script:
- the X screensaver timeout (xset s 1800);
- the display power timeouts (xset dpms);
- xss-lock running the colour build of i3lock through a wrapper, in a respawn loop.
A second screensaver, xscreensaver, is installed and deliberately not started. Earlier it overrode the display power settings with its own, and locked nothing. Its configuration file is still in the home.
The lock screen's 20-odd colours and formats were predecessor theme variables.
The colour build is not in the official repositories (research 026/01).

Starting position:

One module for the lock screen, holding node-lock-screen: the locker and its wrapper as the module's own files, the screensaver and display power timeouts, and xss-lock.
The timeouts and colours are its defaults, and settings later (issue 168).
The colour build ships as ADR 0205's pinned archive, or the module uses the official i3lock. That is the operator's choice, and the colours are the only difference.
xscreensaver is not a module; its package and file are removed.
xss-lock needs the logind session, so it stays a session-start line contributed into .xinitrc's block (question 4), not a unit.

Measured:

Each workstation has a layout script generated by arandr, with the monitor names baked in. One workstation also has several layouts for named places, a hotplug rule and a wizard.
The desktop carried the laptop's layout scripts.
No xorg.conf.d, and no layout tool beyond the scripts.

Starting position: autorandr (official repositories) inside the display server's module.

autorandr saves a layout as a profile keyed by the connected monitors' identities (their EDID) and applies the matching one at login and on hotplug.
Profiles therefore need no machine's name. A profile can be shared mesh-wide and simply never matches on a machine without those monitors. That is exactly the "say it by what is there, never by a name" rule (ADR 0112).
The profiles are the operator's data, saved by the tool itself, so they are found (ADR 0182). A layout verb on node-display-server lists, saves and applies them.
The arandr scripts and the hotplug rule retire once a profile exists for each.

Measured:

rofi is the launcher, the power menu, the theme picker and the clipboard menu.
The operator's scripts call rofi -dmenu in four places and plain dmenu in two. dmenu is installed on neither workstation, so those two fail.

Starting position:

rofi holds node-launcher, and the seat's protocol includes a dmenu-compatible command: read choices on standard input, print the chosen one. Scripts call that command, not a program by name.
dmenu is a module of its own (official repositories), able to hold the same seat on a machine that wants it, for instance a Wayland session where wofi or fuzzel would hold it instead.
The rofi module carries its theme files, and the menus that belong to other modules arrive as those modules' scripts:
- power menu → the session;
- clipboard menu → the clipboard module;
- theme picker → settings, once issue 168 closes.

Measured:

greenclip keeps the clipboard's history, and rofi shows it on a key binding.
greenclip is not in the official repositories.
It is started two ways: the window manager's configuration starts it on both workstations, and on one a user unit is enabled as well.
Its configuration names an absolute home path.
xclip (official) is the command-line clipboard the operator's scripts use.

Starting position:

xclip is a module of its own, a package and nothing else. It is the tool scripts depend on, and a module that needs it requires it.
The clipboard manager holds node-clipboard: its daemon, started once by the session (a session contribution, or a user unit once user-scoped units ship, never both), its configuration with no absolute path, and its menu binding contributed to the window manager.
Which manager holds it is the operator's choice:
- greenclip, as today, shipped under ADR 0205;
- or clipmenu (official), which feeds the same dmenu-compatible command as the launcher seat above, and needs no archive.
On Wayland the same seat is held by cliphist with wl-clipboard, both official.

Measured:

The fonts the desktop uses are hand-copied files in the account's font directory, not packages:
- a Nerd font for the window manager, the bar and the terminal;
- a second one for the prompt;
- on one workstation, the same four files twice, once under URL-encoded names;
- on the other, a different build of the same font and three more copied from a theme's repository.
The system's default monospace is a different font (Noto Sans Mono), so anything that asks for monospace gets another face than the terminal.
The DPI is fixed in an X resource.
Every Nerd font in use is in the official repositories (Hack, Meslo, Iosevka, JetBrains Mono).

Decided (the operator left the choice open, except that it must not be today's Hack):

role	face	why
monospace: terminal, window manager, bar, launcher, prompt	JetBrains Mono Nerd Font	built for long reading in a terminal, unambiguous `0O1lI`, optional ligatures; a version-3 Nerd font, so every icon the prompt and bar use is present
interface: GTK, Qt, notifications	Inter	designed for screens, clear at small sizes
icons missing from any face	Nerd Fonts Symbols	a fallback, so a font without icons still shows them
emoji	Noto Color Emoji
serif and every other script	Noto

All five are official packages.

Starting position:

A fonts module: those packages, and a fontconfig file it owns that maps monospace, sans-serif, serif and the emoji and symbol fallbacks to the chosen faces, so every program agrees.
The terminal, bar, launcher and prompt modules name the family, not a file.
The DPI becomes the display server's setting (issue 168).
The copied files are removed by the operator once the packages are in (ADR 0182).
Fonts are not a seat: several coexist. The module owns the one place where the default is said.