spotlight(6x)

💖 NAME 💖

okay bestie, meet spotlight(6x) from the XScreenSaver manual ✨ — the hack that moves a spotlight around your desktop and reveals little peekaboo slices of an image like a wandering spotlight beam. no cap, it's giving mysterious theater kid with a flashlight. 🎭🔦

📸 SYNOPSIS 📸

spotlight [--display host:display.screen] [--foreground color]
[--background color] [--window] [--root] [--window-id number][--mono]
[--install] [--visual visual] [--delay usecs] [--duration secs]
[--radius pixels] [--fps]

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so the spotlight program grabs an image and exposes only small sections of it at a time — literally as if you're looking through a wandering spotlight beam. 💫 iconic behavior.

The image it manipulates gets grabbed from one of three places, and the ~/.xscreensaver file's grabDesktopImages, grabVideoFrames, and chooseRandomImages options decide which:

• the portion of the screen underlying the window,
• the system's video input,
• or a random file on disk.

see xscreensaver-settings(1) for the full tea. 🍵

💅 OPTIONS 💅

spotlight accepts the following options:

• --window — draw on a newly-created window. this is the default, bestie.
• --root — draw on the root window.
• --window-id number — draw on the specified window.
• --mono — if you're on a color display, pretend we're on a monochrome display. delulu but make it retro. 🖤
• --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.
• --delay microseconds — slow it down.
• --duration seconds — how long to run before loading a new image. default 120 seconds.
• --radius pixels — radius of the spotlight in pixels.
• --fps — display the current frame rate and CPU load.

🌿 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(6x) — go read the whole friend group. 📚💖

©️ COPYRIGHT ©️

okay the legal bit is not a vibe to paraphrase, so here it is exactly:

Copyright © 1999 by Rick Schultz. 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.

🫶 CREDITS 🫶

hacked together by Rick Schultz <rick@skapunx.net>, based on StefView for BackSpace by Darcy Brockbank and on several other xscreensaver hacks. periodt. 💅

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mwah 💋 that's the page, bestie — from X Version 11, version 6.09 (07-Jun-2024), for spotlight(6x). bye and slay 🫶✨