GROMIT(1)

📦 in debian bookworm, debian trixie, ubuntu jammy, ubuntu noble, ubuntu questing

💖 NAME 💖

okay so. gromit — a presentation helper that lets you make annotations on screen. that's the whole vibe. scribble on top of everything, be the main character of your own demo. ✨

oh and btw, this is the gromit(1) page from the General Commands Manual, in case you were wondering where you wandered into. 🫶

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

gromit [options]

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

bestie. Gromit lets you make annotations on your screen. like, directly on it. 💅

It can chill in the background and get activated on demand, so you can draw over all your currently running applications. And the drawing just… stays there. as long as you want it to. You keep using your apps the whole time the drawing is visible — nothing gets blocked, it's giving ghost layer energy. 👑

Gromit is XInput-Aware, so if you have a graphic tablet you can draw lines with different strength, color, erase things, etc. no cap, pressure sensitivity goes hard. 🖊️

And here's the reasoning behind the whole design: since you typically want to use the program you're demonstrating, and highlighting something is just a short interruption of your workflow, Gromit gets activated by either a hotkey or a repeated invocation of Gromit. That repeated invocation thing can, for example, be used by other applications or your windowmanager. so it's basically scriptable, iykyk. 💀

⌨️ KEYBOARD CONTROL ⌨️

By default, Gromit grabs the "Pause" key (you can change that with the --key option), which makes it unavailable to other applications. yes, it's possessive like that. 🙈

The available shortcuts are:

  • Pause — toggle painting
  • SHIFT-Pause — clear screen
  • CTRL-Pause — toggle visibility
  • ALT-Pause — quit Gromit

🎀 OPTIONS (STARTUP) 🎀

A short summary of the available commandline arguments for invoking Gromit — scroll down for the options that control an already running Gromit process. 💖

  • -a, --active — start Gromit and immediately activate it. no waiting, straight to business.
  • -k <keysym>, --key <keysym> — will change the key used to grab the mouse. <keysym> can e.g. be "Pause", "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 from grabbing a key. (yes, "none" — hands off the keyboard entirely, iconic.)
  • -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. (backup plan for when keysym is being dramatic. 💅)
  • -d, --debug — gives some debug output. crumbs of information, we love to see it. 🔍

🌈 OPTIONS (CONTROL) 🌈

A short summary of the available commandline arguments to control an already running Gromit process — see above for the options available to start Gromit. 🦋

  • -q, --quit — will cause the main Gromit process to quit. bye bestie 💜
  • -t, --toggle — will toggle the grabbing of the cursor.
  • -v, --visibility — will toggle the visibility of the window.
  • -c, --clear — will clear the screen.

💀 BUGS 💀

okay so, the not-so-cute part, but you deserve to know:

Gromit may drastically slow down your X-Server, especially when you draw very thin lines. It makes heavily 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. There is nothing I can do about this. 😭

Gromit partially disables DnD, since it lays a transparent window across the whole screen and everything gets "dropped" to this (invisible) window. Gromit tries to minimize this effect: when you clear the screen, the shaped window will be hidden. It will be resurrected when you want to paint something again. However: the window does not hide if you erase everything with the eraser tool — you have to clear the screen explicitly with the gromit --clear command or hide Gromit with gromit --visibility.

so yeah: eraser tool ≠ clearing. drag-and-drop stays broken until you explicitly --clear or --visibility. write that down. 📝

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Simon Budig <simon@gimp.org>

This manual page was written by Pierre Chifflier <chifflier@cpe.fr> and Simon Budig.

and that's the whole page, bestie 🫶 — this one came from the General Commands Manual, GROMIT(1), dated January 16, 2005. old but still slaying, periodt. ✨💖

📦 where this page comes from