XMOUNTAINS(1)

🏔️ XMOUNTAINS(1) — bestie's guide to making fake mountains 💖

okay so this is the manual page for XMOUNTAINS, living in section 1 of the General Commands Manual. buckle up, we're generating fractals. 🦋

---

✨ NAME ✨

xmountains — a fractal landscape generator. that's it, that's the whole vibe. mountains but make them math 🏔️✨

---

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

xmountains [ bqgPdEmMrBnZIASTWFGCapcevfRltxsXYH ]

no cap, that's just a giant pile of flags. every single letter is a little switch you can flip. 💅

---

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

xmountains is an X11 based fractal landscape generator. it makes random fractal surfaces and shows them off in a window. literally just mountains appearing out of nowhere, iconic. 👑

while the program is running, the fractal is continuously extended on the right, and the image is scrolled from right to left so you get to see the newly generated area. it's giving "endless scroll" but make it geology. 🪨

---

🎀 Flags 🎀

okay here's the whole flag menu, no skipping, every single one is below. yes, all of them. i promised. 🫶

• -b — use the root window. your whole desktop is the mountain now, no window border, main character energy. 🌈
• -q — reset the root window when the program exits. lowkey important: this option gets ignored unless the program is actually using the root window. 🙈
• -g [string] — set the geometry of the window. you know, the classic geometry string situation. 📐
• -P [filename] — write the PID to the specified file. so you can find it later. 👀
• -d [string] — set the display. which X display, bestie. 🖥️
• -E — toggle the way that window repainting is done. by default the image pixmap is installed as the background pixmap of the window, and window repainting should be performed automatically by the X server. if that does not work on a particular system, this flag can be used to enable explicit expose event processing. also worth knowing: in the default mode, root window images will remain in place after the program exits. ⚠️ so like, they stick around. remember that.
• -m — display a map of the surface rather than a perspective view. top-down instead of dramatic angle. 🗺️
• -M — disable reflections in the water. no more sparkly lake. 💧😭
• -r [20] — to reduce the load on the X server, the program generates several columns of pixels before scrolling the image. this flag sets the number of columns. a negative value reverses the direction of scrolling. a value of zero makes the program scan across the window without scrolling at all. three modes in one flag, she's versatile. ✨
• -B [80] — set the number of shades of each colour that the program allocates. 🎨
• -n [245] — set a maximum number of colours to use. this is just a different way of setting the number of shades of each colour. same knob, different door. 🚪
• -Z [10] — set the number of seconds that the program sleeps after scrolling the screen. nap time between frames. 😴
• -I [40.0] — set the vertical angle of illumination. 💡
• -A [0.0] — set the horizontal angle of illumination. 💡
• -S [0.6] — set the vertical stretch of the surface. squish or elongate those peaks. 🏔️
• -T [0.5] — set the vertical shift of the surface. 📏
• -W [0.5] — set the height where the water occurs. sea level, bestie. 🌊
• -F [1] — reduce the variation in the foreground height to ensure a good view of the surface. this flag sets the number of iterations for which the foreground height is constrained to a constant value. keeping the front row tidy so you can actually see the view. 🧚
• -G [-1.0] — mean altitude for the for foreground. (yes, that's what the original says. verbatim. i don't make the rules. 🍓)
• -C [0.3] — set the contour parameter. the base colour of a point depends on its height and how flat the surface is. this parameter controls the relative importance of these factors. so it's a little height-vs-flatness weighting situation. ⚖️
• -a [2.5] — set the Altitude of the viewpoint. where your eyeballs are floating. 👁️
• -p [4.0] — set the distance of the viewpoint from the front of the surface. how far back you're standing. 🚶♀️
• -c [1.0] — set the contrast parameter. careful: values too far from 1.0 will give strange results. ⚠️ she's sensitive, treat her gently.
• -e [0.3] — set the ambient light level. this is a fractional value that sets how bright shaded areas will be compared to fully illuminated ground. 🌤️
• -v [0.6] — set the vertical light level. the program also implements a secondary light source shining from directly above the surface. this flag sets how bright this light source is relative to the main light source. two suns?? we love a dual-light situation. ☀️☀️
• -f [0.65] — set the fractal dimension of the surface. this should be in the range 0.5-1.0. 📊
• -R [0] — set the seed for the random number generator. a value of 0 causes the seed to be set from the clock. so 0 means "surprise me". 🎲
• -l [10] — set the width of the surface. increasing this value by one doubles the width of the surface. yes, doubles. exponential, bestie. 😭
• -t [2] — set the number of non-fractal iterations. increasing this value by one doubles the average number of mountains across the width of the surface. also doubles. also unhinged. 🏔️🏔️🏔️🏔️
• -x — use cross updates (see under -H). 🔀
• -s [1] — control the regeneration steps used to reduce creasing. there are three possible regeneration steps controlled by the first 3 bits of this flag value. (see under -H). bit manipulation in a landscape generator, we love to see it. 💅
• -X [0.0] — regeneration step parameter (see under -H). ✨
• -Y [0.0] — regeneration step parameter (see under -H). ✨
• -H — print a short description of the algorithm explaining the -x -s -X and -Y parameters. it's the lore drop. read it. 📖

---

✨ IDENTIFICATION ✨

Author: S.Booth@ed.ac.uk — thank you for the mountains, king/queen/royalty. 👑💖

---

quick vibe check: -E and -c are the two flags with actual "careful bestie" energy in this page, and -q quietly does nothing unless you're on the root window. noted. 📝

---

and that's the page!! this was XMOUNTAINS(1), from the General Commands Manual — the same page you'd get if you typed man 1 xmountains, just with way more emoji. go make some fake mountains, bestie. 🏔️💜✨