GROMIT-MPX(1)

💖 GROMIT-MPX(1) 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the Gromit-MPX page from the General Commands Manual — yes it's a section 1 manpage, and yes it's about to be your new obsession. sit down, grab a strawberry 🍓, and let's get into it.

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✨ NAME ✨

Gromit-MPX — presentation helper to make annotations on screen 💅

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

gromit-mpx [options]

that's it. that's the whole vibe. lowercase, simple, iconic. 👑

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

Gromit-MPX literally lets you make multi-pointer annotations right on top of your screen. no cap. 🖍️

it can chill in the background and then be activated on demand so you can draw over all your currently running applications. and the drawing stays on screen for as long as you want — you can keep using your apps while the drawing is just... sitting there. visible. being art. ✨

Gromit-MPX is XInput-Aware, so if you've got a graphic tablet you can draw lines with different strength, colour, erase things, etc. it's giving artiste. 🎨

and like, since the whole point is that you're demonstrating something and highlighting stuff is only a short interruption of your workflow, Gromit-MPX gets activated by either a hotkey or a repeated invocation of Gromit-MPX. that second one can e.g. be used by other applications or your windowmanager. iykyk. 🫶

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⌨️ KEYBOARD CONTROL ⌨️

by default, Gromit-MPX grabs the "F9" key (this can be changed using the --key option), which means F9 becomes unavailable to other applications. rude? maybe. necessary? absolutely. 💀

the available shortcuts are:

• F9 — toggle painting 🖌️
• SHIFT-F9 — clear screen 🧼
• CTRL-F9 — toggle visibility 👀
• ALT-F9 — quit Gromit-MPX ✌️

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💅 OPTIONS (STARTUP) 💅

a short summary of the available commandline arguments for invoking Gromit-MPX. see below for the options to control an already running Gromit-MPX process. 👇

• -a, --active — start Gromit-MPX and immediately activate it. no waiting, main character energy from second zero. ⚡
• -d, --debug — gives some debug output. for when you need the tea. 🍵
• -k <keysym>, --key <keysym> — will change the key used to grab the mouse. <keysym> can e.g. be "F9", "F12", "Control_R" or "Print". to determine the keysym for different keys you can use the xev(1) command. you can specify "none" to prevent Gromit-MPX from grabbing a key. 🔑
• -K <keycode>, --keycode <keycode> — will change the key used to grab the mouse. under rare circumstances identifying the key with the keysym can fail. you can then use the keycode to specify the key uniquely. to determine the keycode for different keys you can use the xev(1) command. 🗝️
• -o, --opacity <value> — will set the initial opacity of the window using a floating point value between 0 and 1. sheer, see-through, ethereal. 🌫️
• -u <keysym>, --undo-key <keysym> — will change the key used to undo/redo strokes. <keysym> can e.g. be "F9", "F12", "Control_R" or "Print". to determine the keysym for different keys you can use the xev(1) command. you can specify "none" to prevent Gromit-MPX from grabbing a key. ↩️
• -U <keycode>, --undo-keycode <keycode> — will change the key used to undo/redo strokes. under rare circumstances identifying the key with the keysym can fail. you can then use the keycode to specify the key uniquely. to determine the keycode for different keys you can use the xev(1) command. 🔄
• -V, --version — will show the Gromit-MPX version. drop the number, slay. 🏷️

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🎀 OPTIONS (CONTROL) 🎀

a sort summary of the available commandline arguments to control an already running Gromit-MPX process. see above for the options available to start Gromit-MPX. 👆

• -c, --clear — will clear the screen. 🧽
• -q, --quit — will cause the main Gromit-MPX process to quit. bye bestie 😭
• -t, --toggle — will toggle the grabbing of the cursor. 🖱️
• -v, --visibility — will toggle the visibility of the window. 🫥
• -y, --redo — will redo the last undone drawing stroke. ⏩
• -z, --undo — will undo the last drawing stroke. ⏪

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🌈 ENVIRONMENT 🌈

• XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP — Gromit-MPX uses this to determine which desktop environment it is running on. 🖥️
• XDG_CURRENT_SESSION — Gromit-MPX uses this to determine whether is is running under X11 or Wayland. 🌐
• XDG_CONFIG_HOME — directory to search for user's custom configuration file, defaults to ~/.config/. 🏠
• GDK_CORE_DEVICE_EVENTS — if set, GDK does not use the XInput extension and only reacts to core X input events. This renders Gromit-MPX unusable, it will detect this and bail out with an error message.

⚠️ okay so that last one? do not do that. it literally makes Gromit-MPX unusable and it will catch you and bail out with an error. not the vibe. 💀

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📁 FILES 📁

• gromit-mpx.cfg — configuration file which defines pens and maps mouse buttons and modifiers to them. searched for in user's custom configuration file directory and, if not found there, in /etc/gromit-mpx/. 🗂️

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💀 BUGS 💀

when there is no compositing manager such as Compiz, xcompmgr or Mutter running, Gromit-MPX falls back to a legacy drawing mode. this may drastically slow down your X-Server, especially when you draw very thin lines. 😭 it makes heavy use of the shape extension, which is quite expensive if you paint a complex pattern on screen. especially terminal-programs tend to scroll incredibly slow if something is painted over their window. so like... be aware. 🐌

XFCE per default grabs Ctrl-F1 to Ctrl-F12 (switch to workspace 1-12) and Alt-F9 (minimize window) which renders Gromit-MPX's default hotkey mapping unusable. Gromit-MPX detects XFCE and changes the default hotkeys to Home and End. those can can still be overridden by the user. 🙈

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👑 AUTHORS 👑

Simon Budig <simon@gimp.org> Christian Beier <info@christianbeier.net>

this manual page was written by Pierre Chifflier <chifflier@cpe.fr> and Simon Budig for the original Gromit and extended for Gromit-MPX by Christian Beier. 💜

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okay that's the whole page bestie, you're officially certified 📜. this beauty is dated November 3, 2018 — vintage but still eating. 💅✨ go annotate something. 🎀🦋