boxfit(6)

📦
version 6.15 · 2 versions
, in alpine 3.24, arch rolling, nixpkgs unstable

🎀 boxfit — a love letter to growing boxes 🎀

okay bestie, welcome to boxfit, one of the XScreenSaver squad 💅 (that's the XScreenSaver manual btw, we're in section 6). This little icon fills your whole screen with a gradient of boxes or circles that just... grow. It's giving "watch paint dry" but make it ✨hypnotic✨.

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

boxfit [--display host:display.screen] [--visual visual] [--window]
       [--root] [--window-id number] [--delay usecs] [--count int] [--growby
       int] [--spacing int] [--border int] [--circles | --squares | --random]
       [--grab] [--peek] [--fps]

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

So the whole vibe is this: it packs the screen with boxes or circles that grow, and they're colored according to a horizontal or vertical gradient 🌈. Each object grows until it touches something, then it just stops — no overlap, we're respectful here. And when the screen is completely full? They all shrink away and the whole process restarts. Main character energy, looped forever 🔥.

💖 OPTIONS 💖

  • --visual visual — picks which visual to use, bestie. The legal values are literally either the name of a visual class, or the id number of a specific visual (and that number can be in decimal or hex, we don't judge).
  • --window — draws on a newly-created window. This is the default, so like, you're already doing it 🫶.
  • --root — draws on the root window instead. Big "I live here now" energy.
  • --window-id number — draws on the specific window you point at. Very "this one, this specific one" of you.
  • --delay microseconds — how much of a delay gets introduced between steps of the animation. Default is 20000, which is about 0.02 seconds. Slay, but slowly 💀.
  • --count int — how many boxes or circles are animating simultaneously. Default 50. And ngl, smaller numbers yield larger boxes/circles — that's just the math, bestie.
  • --growby int — how many pixels the objects grow by, each frame. Default 1. Baby steps 👑.
  • --spacing int — how many pixels of space get left between the objects. Default 1.
  • --border int — thickness of the colored border around each object. Default 1.
  • --circles | --squares | --random — draw circles, draw squares, or choose randomly. Random is the default because chaos is iconic 🎲.
  • --grab — okay so normally it colors the boxes with a horizontal or vertical gradient. But with --grab? It instead loads a random image and colors the boxes according to the colors in that image 😭. And the fun part: as the picture fills in, some features of the underlying image may become recognisable 👀.
when it's grabbing images, the image gets grabbed from the portion of the screen underlying the window, or from the system's video input, or from a random file on disk — as indicated by the grabDesktopImages, grabVideoFrames, and chooseRandomImages options in the ~/.xscreensaver file. See xscreensaver-settings(1) for more details, iykyk.
  • --peek — this one says to briefly show you the underlying image before beginning 🫣. The default is to not show the unadulterated image at all. Heads up though: this only has an effect when --grab is used. No --grab, no peek, sorry bestie.
  • --fps — displays the current frame rate and CPU load. Number go up 📈.

🌈 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 🦋

X(1), xscreensaver(1) xscreensaver-settings(1), xscreensaver-getimage(6)

Copyright © 2005 by Jamie Zawinski. 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.

🧚 AUTHOR 🧚

Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>

and that's the whole page, bestie 💜 signing off from X Version 11, version 6.15, dated 30-Mar-2026 — this was boxfit(6) from the XScreenSaver manual, mwah 🍓✨

📦 where this page comes from