xphoon(6)

💖 xphoon — Games Manual, section 6 🎀

okay bestie, pull up a chair because this one is genuinely iconic. this is xphoon(6), and yes the name is a whole acrostic situation (PHase of the mOON, iykyk).

✨ NAME ✨

xphoon — displays the PHase of the mOON on the root window

like. it puts the actual moon, in its actual current phase, on your root window. main character energy fr fr 🌙

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

xphoon [-b] [-t interval [-i]] [-s] [-display name]

💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

Xphoon sets the X root window to a picture of the moon in its current phase, including the partial lighting of the dark side by reflected earthlight. 🌍✨🌙

no cap, the dark side isn't even fully dark — it's getting that soft glow from earthshine and it's so pretty.

🦋 OPTIONS 🦋

• -b — Defeats the earthlight feature, forcing the dark side to be black. bye bye glow, hello void 💀
• -t — Have xphoon keep running and update the picture every interval minutes. (Normally, xphoon just sets the root picture and exits.) so it's giving set-and-forget vs. set-and-live-here 🫶
• -i — Forks a background process and prints the process-id to stdout. Useful if you want to make menu commands to refresh or kill xphoon. lowkey the useful one if you're building menus 👑
• -s — Rotate the whole picture 180 degrees, resulting in a moon picture as viewed fom the Southern hemisphere. southern hemisphere besties, this one's for you 🌈
• -demo — Demonstrate xphoon by rapidly stepping through moon phases. it's a little moon slideshow, obsessed ✨

heads up: -display name shows up in the synopsis but isn't its own bullet in the original options list — so I'm leaving it exactly where it lives, up in the synopsis, no guessing, no inventing. 🎀

📝 NOTES 📝

the origin story?? actually so good. The original motivation for this program was that xsetroot was too slow. Loading a full-screen bitmap took about 15 seconds. 😭 fifteen. whole. seconds.

so they made a trivial program that had fullmoon.bitmap compiled in, and it ran in less than a second. (And incidentally, the executable was smaller than fullmoon.xbm.) not the flex you expected but it IS the flex 💅

Then later we came up with the phase hacking, the earthlight, and the auto-scaling. and that's how we got here, periodt. 🌙

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

• phoon(1)
• xsetroot(1)

💜 AUTHORS 💜

Copyright (C) 1988, 1991 by Jef Poskanzer and Craig Leres.

The moon-phase computation is from "moontool.c" by John Walker.

okay that's the whole page, bestie, you're fully caught up 🫶 go set your root window to the moon and go be a celestial main character. no cap.

this was xphoon(6) from the Games Manual — page dated 6 April 1999, and that's the tea 💖🌟