Title: Turn your Xorg in black and white

	Title: Turn your Xorg in black and white
	Author: Solène
	Date: 15 May 2021
	Tags: unix
	Description:

	# Introduction

	If for some reasons you want to turn you display in black and white
	mode and you can't control this on your display (typically a laptop
	display won't allow you to change this), there are solutions.

	# Compositor way

	The best way I found is to use a compositor, fortunately I'm already
	using "picom" as a compositor along with fvwm2 because I found the
	windows are getting drawn faster when I switch between desktop with the
	compositor on. You will want to run the compositor in your ~/.xsession
	file before running your window manager.

	The idea is to run picom with a shader that will turn the color into a
	gray scale, restart picom with no parameter if you want to get colors
	back.

	```command line sample
	picom -b --backend glx --glx-fshader-win "uniform sampler2D tex; uniform float…
	```

	It was surprisingly complicated to find how to do that. I stumbled on
	"toggle-monitor-grayscale" project on github which is a long script to
	automate this depending on your graphic card, I only took the part I
	needed for picom.

	toggle-monitor-grayscale project on Github

	# Conclusion

	I have no idea why someone would like to turn the screen in black and
	white, but I've been curious to see how it would look like and if it
	would be nicer for the eyes, it's an interesting experience I have to
	admit but I prefer to keep my colors.