SM(6)

💖 SM — the manual page, but make it a group chat 💖

okay bestie, so this is sm from the Games Manual (section 6, iykyk), and it's literally the cutest little fullscreen text shower you've ever met. let's get into it 💅

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✨ NAME ✨

sm — Displays a short text fullscreen. that's it. that's the whole vibe. 🎀

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

sm [ OPTIONS ] [ text | - ]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

Screen Message is gonna take whatever multi-line message you give it and display it as large as possible, fullscreen, black on white. iconic behavior honestly. you can hand it the text when you launch sm, or you can just edit it while the program is running — dealer's choice, main character energy either way.

After a short timeout, the text entry and the quit button dip out 💨 leaving literally nothing on the screen but the text you entered. and to keep typing? just start typing, or (left-)click anywhere on the screen. she's always listening. 🫶

To clear the displayed text, press Escape.

To invert the colors of the text and the background, press Ctrl-I.

To quit the program, press Ctrl-Q, or Escape twice, or click the "Quit"-button. three ways to say goodbye, no cap. 😭

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• [ text | - ] — the text to display at start up. defaults to ":-)" (yes, the lil smiley, obsessed). if you pass "-" to sm, it'll read the text to display from the standard input instead — see REMOTE CONTROLLING SM below for the tea. 🍓
• -f, --foreground=colordesc — define a different color for the foreground of the text than black. the text string can be in any of the forms accepted by XParseColor; these include a name for a color from rgb.txt, like DarkSlateGray, or a hex specification like #3050b2 or #35b. slay, you can go full custom palette. 🎨
• -b, --background=colordesc — define a different color for the background of the text than white. for possible values, see above ⬆️ (same rules, bestie).
• -i, --invert — switches the roles of foreground and background colors. useful if you prefer white-on-black. dark mode girlies rise up 🖤✨
• -n, --font=fontspec — define a different font than the default sans-serif font of your system. the fontspec can be the complete name for a truetype font (like "DejaVu Sans" or "Bitstream Vera Serif") or just a short font family specification ("serif", "sans-serif"). pick your font, pick your era 💜
• -r, --rotate=rotation — rotates the display by rotation*90 degrees counter-clock-wise. so -r 1 rotates the display to the left, and -r 2 puts it upside down. chaotic. love that. 🙃
• -a, --align=alignment — aligns the text centered (-a 0), left (-a 1) or right (-a 2). position her wherever she belongs. 👑
• -- — (double dash) end option parsing. this is used to be able to actually hand over text that starts off with a dash. so if your text is like --hi or whatever, this is your girl. 🛟
• -h, --help — this option will give you a short usage message summarizing the recognized options and quits. little cheat sheet, we love a summary. 📋
• -V, --version — this prints the project name together with its version number and quits. flex the version, periodt. ⭐

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🌈 REMOTE CONTROLLING SM 🌈

If sm is called with - as a command line argument, it will read the text to be shown from the standard input. it'll read the input until it reaches the end of the file, or the form feed character \f, and show the input read so far at once. newline characters at the beginning or the end are ignored. the input is assumed to be UTF-8 encoded (see utf8(7)). 💖

This can be used to create automatic displays of changing data or similar tricks. for example, the following command will create a simple digital watch:

(while sleep 1; do date +%T; printf '\f'; done) | sm -

not me piping a live clock into a fullscreen message. that's literally the coolest thing ever and it's three commands. 🔥

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🎀 AUTHOR 🎀

This manual page was written by Joachim Breitner <mail@joachim-breitner.de> and updated by Gerfried Fuchs <rhonda@deb.at> to reflect additions for commandline option handling. thank you for your service, legends 🫡💐

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! this lil cutie comes from the Games Manual, dated November 24, 2012 — so yeah, she's been serving fullscreen text since way back and she still ate. 💅✨ go forth and make your screen say something iconic 💖