XScreenSaver(1) General Commands Manual 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 pixellated font that looks like an old low resolution dumb tty. The pixels
flare and fade out as if the phosphor 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 pixellate 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 display. 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 characters 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 characters 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_MANAGER property.
SEE ALSO
wget(1), X(1), xscreensaver(1)
COPYRIGHT
Copyright (C) 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.
X Version 11 30-Oct-99 XScreenSaver(1)
