fontglide(6x)

💖 fontglide(6x) — the XScreenSaver manual, bestie edition 💖

okay so before we even get into it: this is a page from the XScreenSaver manual, and it's about a program called fontglide. yes the name is giving exactly what you think. let's go 🦋

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✨ NAME ✨

fontglide — literally 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 here's the whole vibe 👑: fontglide reads text from a subprocess and puts it up on the screen using big huge characters that glide in from the edges, assemble themselves into words, and then disperse. like they ✨manifest✨ and then dip. iconic behavior honestly.

alternately — and this is the chill mode — it can just scroll whole sentences from right to left. simple. effective. slay.

✨ OPTIONS ✨

fontglide accepts the following options, and yes we're going through all of them because that's what we do here 💅

• --window — draw on a newly-created window. this is the default, so if you do nothing, this is what you get 🫶
• --root — draw on the root window instead.
• --window-id number — draw on the specified window. you pick the window, it draws there. team work 💖
• --install — install a private colormap for the window.
• --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. ngl this one is for the visual-picker girlies.
• --delay usecs — the delay between steps of the animation, in microseconds. default 10000.
• --page — with this option, a page full of text will glide in, and disperse. whole-page moment 🌸
• --scroll — with this option, sentences will scroll by from right to left.
• --random — the default is to pick randomly between --page and --scroll. it literally cannot decide, and honestly? same.
• --speed float — how fast to animate; 2 means twice as fast, 0.5 means half as fast. default 1.0.
• --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.) it's clingy, we love that for it 💜
• --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.) if the program exits, it will be launched again after we have processed all the text it produced. default: xscreensaver-text(6x).
• --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 font! 🎀
• --bw int — how thick an outline to draw around the characters. default 2 pixels.
• --trails — leave "vapor trails" behind the moving text. default off. turn it on for the drama 🔥
• --no-db — turn off double-buffering. it may be faster, but will flicker. ⚠️ that's the tradeoff, bestie, no cap.
• --debug — draw some boxes showing character metrics, and print the name of the current font to stderr. detective mode 🔍
• --fps — display the current frame rate and CPU load. numbers go brrr 📈

✨ ENVIRONMENT ✨

env vars it cares about, keep these in mind 💭

• 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 ✨

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

^ that's the whole crew, go read them too, iykyk 🧚

✨ COPYRIGHT ✨

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.

(yes i kept the legal text exactly as-is, do not mess with the license bestie, that's the one thing you never touch 💀)

✨ AUTHOR ✨

Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>, 15-Sep-2003. king behavior honestly 👑

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and that's the page!! 🎉 this one shipped as part of X Version 11, release 6.09 (07-Jun-2024) — so if you ever forget where it came from, that's the version and that's the date, mwah 💋 go make some letters glide, fontglide(6x) out 🦋✨