NAME(1)

🎀 NAME 🎀

okay so bestie, gather round — this is ticker, and it's the little guy that scrolls messages across your screen on loop, forever, like your fave song on repeat. 💖

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

ticker [options] [message]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

ticker is a program that continually scrolls a given message across the screen. it just... keeps going. iconic behavior tbh. 🔥

and the tea is: there's also an interface to allow other programs to change the message. so like, other programs can slide in and swap the text out while it's running. main character collab energy. 👑

💅 KEYS 💅

• +, [up arrow] — crank that scroll speed UP. faster. zoom. 🚀
• -, [down arrw] (sic, that's how it's written, no cap 💀) — slow it down, bestie. chill vibes. 🐌
• [space] — pause. then press any key to unpause. it's giving "brb" and then immediately "ok I'm back". 🙈

🌸 OPTIONS 🌸

• -h, --help — show a lil summary of the options. the TL;DR, the cheat sheet, the sparknotes. 📝
• -u, --upper — scroll the text on the top line of the screen. (Default) — yes bestie, this is the one you get if you don't say anything. the default ate. 💖
• -l, --lower — scroll the text on the bottom line of the screen. down bad. literally. 😌
• -fcolor, --foreground=color — use the color you pick as the foreground color of the text that gets scrolled. your text, your palette, your era. ✨ the colors you're allowed to use are:

black           gray
red             brightred
green           brightgreen
brown           yellow
blue            brightblue
magenta         brightmagenta
cyan            brightcyan
lightgray       white

• -bcolor, --background=color — use the color you pick as the background color of the text that gets scrolled. heads up though: on most terminals, the background color can only be one of the colors listed in the first column above. so like, half the palette is off-limits for backgrounds, unfortunately. 😭
• -dsecs, --delay=secs — number of seconds of delay between updates of the display. this is what controls how fast the text scrolls. and yes you can use decimals to specify faster scroll speeds — go feral. the default delay is 1 second; the author finds 0.1 more pleasing. relatable, 1 second is lowkey giving snail. 🐌💀
• -snum, --sysv=num — read messages to display from the sysv shared memory segment with an id of num. this is only for use by other programs that need to be able to change the text ticker displays. it's not for you, bestie, it's for the other programs. iykyk. 🤝
• -Snum, --size=num — size of the shared memory segment to read, when you're using shared memory communication with another program. default is 80 characters. 📏
• -csecs, --check=secs — minimum time between checks of the shared memory segment for a new message. default is every second. but real talk: it may in fact check considerably less often, because it only checks for a new message once per time that the current message scrolls around the screen. so it's on its own schedule fr. ⏰
• message — the message to scroll. Required unless -s is used, in which case it's optional. so you either bring the message yourself, or the shared memory brings it for you. teamwork. 🫶

📝 NOTES 📝

to use the other 23 or so lines of your screen for something useful while the ticker is running, you might want to use splitvt(1). because bestie, that ticker is only taking up ONE line and the rest of your terminal is just sitting there, unemployed. 💀

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net> — the legend, the moment, the blueprint. 🫶

and that's the whole page, bestie!! this was NAME(1) from the General Commands Manual — yes, the same NAME(1) in the header and the footer, they really said symmetry 💅 — and it's the version as it appears in that manual. no cap, you're now certified in scrolling text. go make something beautiful scroll across your screen. ✨🎀🦋🌸💖