fontglide(6)

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

💅 fontglide(6) — the XScreenSaver manual, but make it make sense 🎀

okay so picture this: you're chilling in fontglide(6) (that's the manual section, bestie, we love a section number) and the whole vibe is characters float onto the screen to form words. That's the whole thing. That's the tea. ☕✨

✨ NAME ✨

fontglide — characters float onto the screen to form words 🦋

🫶 SYNOPSIS 🫶

fontglide [--display host:display.screen] [--window] [--root]
[--window-id number][--install] [--visual visual] [--delay usecs]
[--scroll] [--page] [--random] [--speed float] [--linger float]
[--program sh-command] [--font font-name] [--bw int] [--trails] [--db]
[--debug] [--fps]

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

So fontglide reads text from a subprocess and puts it on the screen using big ol' characters that glide in from the edges, assemble themselves into actual words, and then disperse. It's giving main character energy for letters. 💫

Alternately — because she contains multitudes — it can simply scroll whole sentences from right to left. That's it. That's the program. No cap.

💖 OPTIONS 💖

fontglide accepts the following options, and yes, we're going through all of them, bestie, nobody's skipping:

  • --window — Draw on a newly-created window. This is the default, so if you do nothing, congrats, you already did it. 👑
  • --root — Draw on the root window. Yep, straight up on your desktop background.
  • --window-id number — Draw on the specified window. You pick the window, she draws on it.
  • --install — Install a private colormap for the window. Fancy color situation, just for her.
  • --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. Hex girlies rise up. 🔥
  • --delay usecs — The delay between steps of the animation, in microseconds. Default 10000. Tiny baby time units. ⏱️
  • --page — With this option, a page full of text will glide in, and disperse. A whole page. Iconic behavior honestly.
  • --scroll — With this option, sentences will scroll by from right to left. Classic. Timeless. Ate.
  • --random — The default is to pick randomly between --page and --scroll. Chaos is the default setting, as it should be. 🎲
  • --speed float — How fast to animate; 2 means twice as fast, 0.5 means half as fast. Default 1.0. Do with that what you will.
  • --linger float — How long to leave the assembled text on the screen in --page mode; 2 means twice as long, 0.5 means half as long. Default 1.0. (The more words there are on the screen, the longer it lingers.) So yeah, word count = linger count, lowkey.
  • --program sh-command — The command to run to generate the text to display. This option may be any string acceptable to /bin/sh. The program will be run at the end of a pipe, and any words that it prints to stdout will end up on the window. (Whitespace and line breaks are ignored — she does not care about your formatting.) If the program exits, it will be launched again after we have processed all the text it produced. Default: xscreensaver-text(6). The pipeline never sleeps. 😤
  • --font string — The base font pattern to use when loading fonts. The default is to search for any Latin1 scalable proportional fonts on the system. Once a base font is selected, it will be loaded in a random size. Surprise! Different size every time. We love a little randomness. 🎀
  • --bw int — How thick an outline to draw around the characters. Default 2 pixels. Chunky outline = superior outline, ngl.
  • --trails — Leave "vapor trails" behind the moving text. Default off. Turn it on for the aesthetic. 🌈
  • --no-db — Turn off double-buffering. It may be faster, but will flicker. So like... faster and uglier. Your call, babe. 💀
  • --debug — Draw some boxes showing character metrics, and print the name of the current font to stderr. For when you need to see the guts of the thing.
  • --fps — Display the current frame rate and CPU load. Numbers on the screen. Very demure, very mindful. 📊

🧚 ENVIRONMENT 🧚

  • DISPLAY — to get the default host and display number. She needs to know where to show up, obviously.
  • XENVIRONMENT — to get the name of a resource file that overrides the global resources stored in the RESOURCE_MANAGER property. Your personal override era.
  • XSCREENSAVER_WINDOW — The window ID to use with --root.

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

xscreensaver(1), xscreensaver-text(6), fortune(1), phosphor(6), apple2(6), starwars(6), ljlatest(6), dadadodo(1), webcollage(6), driftnet(1) EtherPEG, EtherPeek

the whole friend group fr fr 💜

Copyright © 2003 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.

(that's the legal bit, keep it intact, it's doing important work 🫶)

🌟 AUTHOR 🌟

Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>, 15-Sep-2003.

and that's the page, bestie! ✨ cute little sign-off to match the footer: this is X Version 11, page version 6.15, dated 30-Mar-2026 — so you know it's fresh. 🌸💅

📦 where this page comes from