1phosphor(6x) XScreenSaver manual phosphor(6x)
2
6 phosphor - simulates an old terminal with long-sustain phosphor
7
9 phosphor [-display host:display.screen] [-window] [-root] [-install]
10 [-visual visual] [-font font] [-scale int] [-ticks int] [-delay usecs]
11 [-program command] [-meta] [-esc] [-bs] [-del] [-fps]
12
14 The phosphor program draws text on the screen in a very large pixelated
15 font that looks like an old low resolution dumb tty. The pixels flare
16 and fade out as if the phosphor was very long-sustain. It is also a
17 fully functional vt100 terminal emulator.
18
20 phosphor accepts the following options:
21 -window Draw on a newly-created window. This is the default.
23 -root Draw on the root window.
25 -install
27 Install a private colormap for the window.
28 -visual visual
30 Specify which visual to use. Legal values are the name of a
31 visual class, or the id number (decimal or hex) of a specific
32 visual.
33 -font font-name
35 The X font to use. Phosphor can take any font and scale it up
36 to pixelate it. The default is fixed.
37 -scale int
39 How much to scale the font up: in other words, the size in real
40 pixels of the simulated pixels. Default 6.
41 -ticks int
43 The number of colors to use when fading to black. Default 20.
44 -delay usecs
46 The speed of the terminal: how long to wait between drawing
47 each character. Default 50000, or about 1/20th second.
48 -pty Launch the sub-program under a PTY, so that it can address the
50 screen directly. This is the default.
51 -pipe Launch the sub-program at the end of a pipe: do not let it ad‐
53 dress the screen directly.
54 -program sh-command
56 The command to run to generate the text to display. This op‐
57 tion may be any string acceptable to /bin/sh. The program will
58 be run at the end of a pty or pipe, and any characters that it
59 prints to stdout will be printed on phosphor's window. The
60 characters will be printed artificially slowly, as per the -de‐
61 lay option above. If the program exits, it will be launched
62 again after 5 seconds.
63 For example:
65 phosphor -program 'cat /usr/src/linux*/README'
67 phosphor -program 'ping localhost'
68 phosphor -program 'ps -e'
69 phosphor -program 'od -txC -w6 /dev/random'
70 phosphor -program 'cat /dev/random'
71 phosphor -scale 2 -geom =1280x1024 -program 'top'
72 phosphor -scale 4 -geom =1280x1024 \
73 -program 'mtr www.kernel.org'
74 phosphor -program 'xemacs -nw -q -f life'
75 phosphor -scale 5 -geom =1280x1024 \
76 -program 'xemacs -nw -q --eval "(hanoi 5)"'
77 If you have the festival(1) text-to-speech system installed,
79 you can have it read the screen as phosphor prints it:
80 phosphor -program \
82 'xscreensaver-text | tee /dev/stderr | festival --tts'
83 You can also use phosphor as a lo-fi replacement for the
85 xterm(1) and gnome-terminal(1) terminal emulators:
86 phosphor -delay 0 -program tcsh
88 -esc When the user types a key with the Alt or Meta keys held
90 down, send an ESC character first. This is the default.
91 -meta When Meta or Alt are held down, set the high bit on the charac‐
93 ter instead.
94 -del Swap Backspace and Delete. This is the default.
96 -bs Do not swap Backspace and Delete.
98 -fps Display the current frame rate and CPU load.
100
102 By default, phosphor allocates a pseudo-tty for the sub-process to run
103 under. This has the desirable side effect that the program will be
104 able to use ioctl(2) to fetch information about terminal parameters and
105 window size, which many programs (such as top(1)) need to run properly.
106 phosphor will also set the environment variable TERM to vt100 in the
107 child process.
108 Any characters typed on the phosphor window will be passed along to the
110 sub-process. (Note that this only works when running in "window" mode,
111 not when running in -root mode under xscreensaver.)
112
114 DISPLAY to get the default host and display number.
115 XENVIRONMENT
117 to get the name of a resource file that overrides the global
118 resources stored in the RESOURCE_MANAGER property.
119 TERM to inform the sub-process of the type of terminal emulation.
121
123 xscreensaver(1), xscreensaver-text(6x), fortune(1), apple2(6x), star‐
124 wars(6x), fontglide(6x), ljlatest(6x), dadadodo(1), webcollage(6x),
125 driftnet(1) EtherPEG, EtherPeek, console_codes(4).
126
128 Copyright © 1999 by Jamie Zawinski. Permission to use, copy, modify,
129 distribute, and sell this software and its documentation for any pur‐
130 pose is hereby granted without fee, provided that the above copyright
131 notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and
132 this permission notice appear in supporting documentation. No repre‐
133 sentations are made about the suitability of this software for any pur‐
134 pose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.
135
137 Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>, 27-Apr-99. Pty and vt100 emulation by
138 Fredrik Tolf <fredrik@dolda2000.com>.
139X Version 11 6.02-4.fc35 (09-Nov-2021) phosphor(6x)