DISPLAY
to get the default host and display number.
phosphor1
Simulates an old terminal with long-sustain phosphor
Usage
phosphor [-display
host:display.screen]
[-window]
[-root]
[-install]
[-visual
visual]
[-font
font]
[-scale
int]
[-ticks
int]
[-delay
usecs]
[-program
command]
Overview
The phosphor program draws text on the screen in a very large pixellated font that looks like an old low resolution dumb tty. The pixels flare and fade out as if the phosphor was very long-sustain.
Options
phosphor accepts the following options:
-
-window -
Draw on a newly-created window. This is the default.
-
-root -
Draw on the root window.
-
-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.
-
-font font-name -
The X font to use. Phosphor can take any font and scale it up to pixellate it. The default is fixed.
-
-scale int -
How much to scale the font up: in other words, the size in real pixels of the simulated pixels. Default 6.
-
-ticks int -
The number of colors to use when fading to black. Default 20.
-
-delay usecs -
The speed of the terminal: how long to wait between drawing each character. Default 50000, or about 1/20th second.
-
-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 characters that it prints to stdout will be printed on phosphor's window. The characters will be printed artificially slowly, as per the -delay option above. If the program exits, it will be launched again after 5 seconds.
Note that phosphor is not a terminal emulator: programs that try to directly address the screen will not do what you might expect. Phosphor merely draws the characters on the screen left to right, top to bottom. Lines wrap when they reach the right edge, and the screen scrolls when characters reach the bottom.
In other words, programs like fortune(1) will work, but programs like top(1) won't.
Here's a good trick, to get phosphor to display recent web search terms:
phosphor -program \ 'wget -qO- http://webcrawler.com/cgi-bin/SearchTicker'
Environment
-
XENVIRONMENT -
to get the name of a resource file that overrides the global resources stored in the RESOURCE_MANAGER property.
Releases
2 releases since Debian 2.2 (Potato); the text changed 1 time.