xscreensaver(1)
NAME
phosphor - simulates an old terminal with long-sustain
phosphor
SYNOPSIS
phosphor [-display host:display.screen] [-window] [-root] [-install] [-visual visual] [-font font] [-scale int] [-ticks int] [-delay usecs] [-program command]
DESCRIPTION
The phosphor program draws text on the screen in a very
large pixelated font that looks like an old low resolution
dumb tty. The pixels flare and fade out as if the phos
phor was very long-sustain.
OPTIONS
phosphor accepts the following options:
- -window Draw on a newly-created window. This is the
- default.
- -root Draw on the root window.
- -install
- Install a private colormap for the window.
- -visual visual
- Specify which visual to use. Legal values are the
name of a visual class, or the id number (decimal
or hex) of a specific visual. - -font font-name
- The X font to use. Phosphor can take any font and
scale it up to pixelate it. The default is fixed. - -scale int
- How much to scale the font up: in other words, the
size in real pixels of the simulated pixels.
Default 6. - -ticks int
- The number of colors to use when fading to black.
Default 20. - -delay usecs
- The speed of the terminal: how long to wait
between drawing each character. Default 50000, or
about 1/20th second. - -program sh-command
- The command to run to generate the text to dis
play. This option may be any string acceptable to
/bin/sh. The program will be run at the end of a
pipe, and any characters that it prints to stdout will be printed on phosphor's window. The charac
ters will be printed artificially slowly, as per
the -delay option above. If the program exits, it will be launched again after 5 seconds. - Note that phosphor is not a terminal emulator:
programs that try to directly address the screen
will not do what you might expect. Phosphor
merely draws the characters on the screen left to
right, top to bottom. Lines wrap when they reach
the right edge, and the screen scrolls when char
acters reach the bottom. - In other words, programs like fortune(1) will work, but programs like top(1) won't.
- Here's a good trick, to get phosphor to display
recent web search terms:
phosphor -program 'wget-qO- http://webcrawler.com/cgi-bin/SearchTicker'
ENVIRONMENT
DISPLAY to get the default host and display number.
- XENVIRONMENT
- to get the name of a resource file that overrides
the global resources stored in the RESOURCE_MAN
AGER property.
SEE ALSO
wget(1), X(1), xscreensaver(1)
COPYRIGHT
Copyright © 1999 by Jamie Zawinski. Permission to use,
copy, modify, distribute, and sell this software and its
documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without
fee, provided that the above copyright notice appear in
all copies and that both that copyright notice and this
permission notice appear in supporting documentation. No
representations are made about the suitability of this
software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without
express or implied warranty.
AUTHOR
- Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>, 27-Apr-99.