XROOTCONSOLE(1)

💖 XROOTCONSOLE(1) 💖

okay bestie, so this is xrootconsole, a general commands manual page, and I'm about to make it make sense. it's a tiny lil utility and honestly it's iconic, let's go 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

xrootconsole — display a file (or stdin) to a transparent window

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

xrootconsole [options] [file]

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so like, xrootconsole is this small utility that takes whatever you feed it and displays it in a transparent text box sitting right on X's root window. it'll read from any file you list on the command line, or, by default, from stdin. 🌸

and the way it's most useful? when it's reading from a FIFO — that lets you redirect a whole bunch of commands into the FIFO and just, like, monitor all their output at once. multi-tasking queen behavior 👑

the options are as follows, no skipping, we're doing all of them:

• -fg color — sets the color used to display text. default is black.
• -bg color — sets the color to AND with the root window, for that shaded transparency vibe. default is clear.
• -bw number — sets the width of the border around xrootconsole, in pixels. default is 0.
• -bd color — sets the color used for the window border. default is black.
• -fn font — sets the font used to display text. default is fixed.
• -c number — makes the output number columns wide. text gets written vertically down each column, in the order it arrives from the input file. default is 1.
• --topdown — forces xrootconsole to show new lines at the top of the screen, scrolling the previous lines downward. the default behavior is the opposite: new lines go in at the bottom and the old ones scroll up. 🔄
• --wrap — instead of truncating long lines, this tells xrootconsole to wrap the excess text onto the following line (or lines), as needed. no more chopped-off sentences, we love to see it 💅
• --ansi-color — enables color support by parsing ANSI escape sequences. 🌈
• -geometry geometry — sets the preferred size and position of the window; go look at X(1) for the details. default is 80x10+0+0.
• -h, --help — shows a detailed usage message and exits. helpful king 🫶
• -v, --version — shows the program version and exits.
• file — optionally names a file to read input from; by default, xrootconsole reads from the standard input.

✨ DIAGNOSTICS ✨

exit status is 0 on success, and 1 if the command fails for any reason. simple as that, fr fr.

✨ AUTHORS ✨

• Eric Youngblut is the original author of xrootconsole. 🎀
• Bob Galloway ⟨bob@de-fac.to⟩ is the current maintainer.
• Alexandre Duret-Lutz eliminated flicker by storing the background pixmap and drawing off-screen. absolute icon behavior ✨
• this manual page was written by Zak Johnson ⟨zakj@i.am⟩.

and that's the whole thing bestie!! this page comes to you from Debian, dated May 19, 2000 — yes it's vintage, yes it still slays, periodt 💖🦋