NAME¶
sm - Displays a short text fullscreen
SYNOPSIS¶
sm [ OPTIONS ] [
text |
- ]
DESCRIPTION¶
Screen Message will display a given multi-line message as large as
possible, fullscreen and black on white. You can specify the text either when
launching sm, or edit it while the program is running.
After a short timeout, the text entry and the quit button will disappear,
leaving nothing on the screen but the entered text. To continue entering text,
just start typing or (left-)click anywhere on the screen.
To clear the displayed text, press Escape.
To quit the program, press Ctrl-Q, or Escape twice, or click the
"Quit"-button.
OPTIONS¶
- [ text | - ]
- Text to display at start up. Defaults to ":-)". If
"-" is passed to sm, it will read the text to display
from the standard input, see REMOTE CONTROLLING SM.
- -f, --foreground=colordesc
- Define a different color to use for the foreground of the text to display
than black. The text string can be in any of the forms accepted by
XParseColor; these include name for a color from rgb.txt, such as
DarkSlateGray, or a hex specification such as #3050b2 or #35b.
- -b, --background=colordesc
- Define a different color to use for the background of the text to display
than white. For possible values, see above.
- -n, --font=fontspec
- Define a different font to use than the default sans-serif font of your
system. The fontspec be the complete name for a truetype font (like
"DejaVu Sans" or "Bitstream Vera Serif") or just a
short font family specification ("serif",
"sans-serif").
- -r, --rotate=rotation
- Rotates the display by rotation*90 degrees counter-clock-wise. So -r 1
rotates the display to the left, and -r 2 puts it upside down.
- -a, --align=alignment
- Aligns the text centered (-a 0), left (-a 1) or right (-a 2).
- --
- (Double dash) End option parsing. This is used to be able to actually hand
over text that starts of with an dash.
- -h, --help
- This option will give you a short usage message summarizing the recognized
options and quits.
- -V, --version
- This prints the project name together with its version number quits.
REMOTE CONTROLLING SM¶
If sm is called with
- as a command line argument, it will read the text
to be shown from the standard input. It will read the input until it reaches
the end of the file, or the line feed character
\f, and show the input
read so far at once. Newline characters at the beginning or the end are
ignored. The input is assumed to be UTF-8 encoded (see
utf8(7)).
This can be used to create automatic displays of changing data or similar
tricks. For example, the following command will create a simple digital watch:
(while sleep 1; do date +%T; echo -e '\f'; done) | sm -
AUTHOR¶
This manual page was written by Joachim Breitner
<mail@joachim-breitner.de> and updated by Gerfried Fuchs
<rhonda@deb.at> to reflect additions for commandline option
handling.