alienbeacon(6)

📦 version 6.15, in alpine 3.24, arch rolling, nixpkgs unstable

🛸 alienbeacon(6) — XScreenSaver manual vibes ✨

✨ NAME ✨

alienbeacon — screen saver. 🛸💖

📜 SYNOPSIS 📜

okay bestie, the whole invocation is literally this, and you know we keep it exact:

alienbeacon [--display host:display.screen] [--visual visual] [--window]
            [--root] [--delay number] [--speed number] [--scale number] [--fps]

👽 DESCRIPTION 👽

So our investigation of the signal from the planet's surface brought us to what seems to be an alien beacon. 🛸 Based on the rock formation around the beacon, it was probably left here millions of years ago. Not me getting emotional over ancient rock formation lore 😭✨

💅 OPTIONS 💅

okay bestie, every single flag is here — no skips, no cap:

  • --visual visual — Specify which visual to use. Legal values are the name of a visual class, or the id number (decimal or hex) of a specific visual. 👀
  • --window — Draw on a newly-created window. This is the default. 🪟
  • --root — Draw on the root window. 🌈
  • --delay number — Per-frame delay, in microseconds. Default: 20000 (0.02 seconds). ⏱️
  • --speed number — Animation speed. 2.0 means twice as fast, 0.5 means half as fast. 🏃‍♀️💨
  • --scale number — Frame buffer resolution. 0.5 means halve the resolution for better performance but lower quality output. Default 1.0, full quality. 🎀
  • --fps | --no-fps — Whether to show a frames-per-second display at the bottom of the screen. 🎞️

🌸 ENVIRONMENT 🌸

  • DISPLAY — to get the default host and display number. 🖥️
  • XENVIRONMENT — to get the name of a resource file that overrides the global resources stored in the RESOURCE_MANAGER property. 📁
  • XSCREENSAVER_WINDOW — The window ID to use with --root. 🪟

🔗 SEE ALSO 🔗

The legal bit is not a vibe, it is the vibe, and it stays exactly like this:

Copyright © 2014 by Otavio Good. Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute, and sell this software and its documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation. No representations are made about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.

periodt. 💜

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Otavio Good. 👑✨

💖 Cute sign-off: X Version 11 · 6.15 · 30-Mar-2026 · alienbeacon(6) — bye bestie! 💅

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