NAME¶
xscreensaver-demo - interactively control the background xscreensaver daemon
SYNOPSIS¶
xscreensaver-demo [-display
host:display.screen] [-prefs]
[--debug]
DESCRIPTION¶
The
xscreensaver-demo program is a graphical front-end for setting the
parameters used by the background
xscreensaver(1) daemon. It is
essentially two things: a tool for editing the
~/.xscreensaver file;
and a tool for demoing the various graphics hacks that the
xscreensaver
daemon will launch.
The main window consists of a menu bar and two tabbed pages. The first page is
for editing the list of demos, and the second is for editing various other
parameters of the screensaver.
MENU COMMANDS¶
All of these commands are on either the
File or
Help menus:
- Blank Screen Now
- Activates the background xscreensaver daemon, which will then run a
demo at random. This is the same as running xscreensaver-command(1)
with the -activate option.
- Lock Screen Now
- Just like Blank Screen Now, except the screen will be locked as
well (even if it is not configured to lock all the time.) This is the same
as running xscreensaver-command(1) with the -lock
option.
- Kill Daemon
- If the xscreensaver daemon is running on this screen, kill it. This is the
same as running xscreensaver-command(1) with the -exit
option.
- Restart Daemon
- If the xscreensaver daemon is running on this screen, kill it. Then launch
it again. This is the same as doing `` xscreensaver-command -exit''
followed by `` xscreensaver''.
Note that it is not the same as doing `` xscreensaver-command
-restart''.
- Exit
- Exits the xscreensaver-demo program (this program) without
affecting the background xscreensaver daemon, if any.
- About...
- Displays the version number of this program,
xscreensaver-demo.
- Documentation...
- Opens up a web browser looking at the XScreenSaver web page, where you can
find online copies of the xscreensaver(1),
xscreensaver-demo(1), and xscreensaver-command(1)
manuals.
DISPLAY MODES TAB¶
This page contains a list of the names of the various display modes, a preview
area, and some fields that let you configure screen saver behavior.
- Mode
- This option menu controls the activation behavior of the screen saver. The
options are:
- Disable Screen Saver
- Don't ever blank the screen, and don't ever allow the monitor to power
down.
- Blank Screen Only
- When blanking the screen, just go black: don't run any graphics.
- Only One Screen Saver
- When blanking the screen, only ever use one particular display mode (the
one selected in the list.)
- Random Screen Saver
- When blanking the screen, select a random display mode from among those
that are enabled and applicable. If there are multiple monitors connected,
run a different display mode on each one. This is the default.
- Random Same Saver
- This is just like Random Screen Saver, except that the same
randomly-chosen display mode will be run on all monitors, instead of
different ones on each.
- Demo List
- Double-clicking in the list on the left will let you try out the indicated
demo. The screen will go black, and the program will run in full-screen
mode, just as it would if the xscreensaver daemon had launched it.
Clicking the mouse again will stop the demo and un-blank the screen.
Single-clicking in the list will run it in the small preview pane on the
right. (But beware: many of the display modes behave somewhat differently
when running in full-screen mode, so the scaled-down view might not give
an accurate impression.)
When Mode is set to Random Screen Saver, each name in the list
has a checkbox next to it: this controls whether this display mode is
enabled. If it is unchecked, then that mode will not be chosen. (Though
you can still run it explicitly by double-clicking on its name.)
- Arrow Buttons
- Beneath the list are a pair of up and down arrows. Clicking on the down
arrow will select the next item in the list, and then run it in
full-screen mode, just as if you had double-clicked on it. The up arrow
goes the other way. This is just a shortcut for trying out all of the
display modes in turn.
- Blank After
- After the user has been idle this long, the xscreensaver daemon
will blank the screen.
- Cycle After
- After the screensaver has been running for this long, the currently
running graphics demo will be killed, and a new one started. If this is 0,
then the graphics demo will never be changed: only one demo will run until
the screensaver is deactivated by user activity.
- Lock Screen
- When this is checked, the screen will be locked when it activates.
- Lock Screen After
- This controls the length of the ``grace period'' between when the
screensaver activates, and when the screen becomes locked. For example, if
this is 5 minutes, and Blank After is 10 minutes, then after 10
minutes, the screen would blank. If there was user activity at 12 minutes,
no password would be required to un-blank the screen. But, if there was
user activity at 15 minutes or later (that is, Lock Screen After
minutes after activation) then a password would be required. The default
is 0, meaning that if locking is enabled, then a password will be required
as soon as the screen blanks.
- Preview
- This button, below the small preview window, runs the demo in full-screen
mode so that you can try it out. This is the same thing that happens when
you double-click an element in the list. Click the mouse to dismiss the
full-screen preview.
- Settings
- This button will pop up a dialog where you can configure settings specific
to the display mode selected in the list.
SETTINGS DIALOG¶
When you click on the
Settings button on the
Display Modes tab, a
configuration dialog will pop up that lets you customize settings of the
selected display mode. Each display mode has its own custom configuration
controls on the left side.
On the right side is a paragraph or two describing the display mode. Below that
is a
Documentation button that will display the display mode's manual
page, if it has one, in a new window (since each of the display modes is
actually a separate program, they each have their own manual.)
The
Advanced button reconfigures the dialog box so that you can edit the
display mode's command line directly, instead of using the graphical controls.
ADVANCED TAB¶
This tab lets you change various settings used by the xscreensaver daemon
itself, as well as some global options shared by all of the display modes.
Image Manipulation
Some of the graphics hacks manipulate images. These settings control where those
source images come from. (All of these options work by invoking the
xscreensaver-getimage(1) program, which is what actually does the
work.)
- Grab Desktop Images
- If this option is selected, then they are allowed to manipulate the
desktop image, that is, a display mode might draw a picture of your
desktop melting, or being distorted in some way. The security-paranoid
might want to disable this option, because if it is set, it means that the
windows on your desktop will occasionally be visible while your screen is
locked. Others will not be able to do anything, but they may be
able to see whatever you left on your screen.
- Grab Video Frames
- If your system has a video capture card, selecting this option will allow
the image-manipulating modes to capture a frame of video to operate
on.
- Choose Random Image
- If this option is set, then the image-manipulating modes will select a
random image file to operate on, from the specified source. That source
may be a local directory, which will be recursively searched for images.
Or, it may be the URL of an RSS or Atom feed (e.g., a Flickr gallery), in
which case a random image from that feed will be selected instead. The
contents of the feed will be cached locally and refreshed periodically as
needed.
If more than one of the above image-related options are selected, then one will
be chosen at random. If none of them are selected, then an image of video
colorbars will be used instead.
Text Manipulation
Some of the display modes display and manipulate text. The following options
control how that text is generated. (These parameters control the behavior of
the
xscreensaver-text(1) program, which is what actually does the
work.)
- Host Name and Time
- If this checkbox is selected, then the text used by the screen savers will
be the local host name, OS version, date, time, and system load.
- Text
- If this checkbox is selected, then the literal text typed in the field to
its right will be used. If it contains % escape sequences, they will be
expanded as per strftime(2).
- Text File
- If this checkbox is selected, then the contents of the corresponding file
will be displayed.
- Program
- If this checkbox is selected, then the given program will be run,
repeatedly, and its output will be displayed.
- URL
- If this checkbox is selected, then the given HTTP URL will be downloaded
and displayed repeatedly. If the document contains HTML, RSS, or Atom, it
will be converted to plain-text first.
Note: this re-downloads the document every time the screen saver runs out of
text, so it will probably be hitting that web server multiple times a
minute. Be careful that the owner of that server doesn't consider that to
be abusive.
Power Management Settings
These settings control whether, and when, your monitor powers down.
- Power Management Enabled
- Whether the monitor should be powered down after a period of inactivity.
If this option is grayed out, it means your X server does not support the
XDPMS extension, and so control over the monitor's power state is not
available.
If you're using a laptop, don't be surprised if this has no effect: many
laptops have monitor power-saving behavior built in at a very low level
that is invisible to Unix and X. On such systems, you can typically only
adjust the power-saving delays by changing settings in the BIOS in some
hardware-specific way.
- Standby After
- If Power Management Enabled is selected, the monitor will go black
after this much idle time. (Graphics demos will stop running, also.)
- Suspend After
- If Power Management Enabled is selected, the monitor will go into
power-saving mode after this much idle time. This duration should be
greater than or equal to Standby.
- Off After
- If Power Management Enabled is selected, the monitor will fully
power down after this much idle time. This duration should be greater than
or equal to Suspend.
- Quick Power-off in Blank Only Mode
- If the display mode is set to Blank Screen Only and this is
checked, then the monitor will be powered off immediately upon blanking,
regardless of the other power-management settings. In this way, the power
management idle-timers can be completely disabled, but the screen will be
powered off when black. (This might be preferable on laptops.)
Fading and Colormaps
These options control how the screen fades to or from black when a screen saver
begins or ends.
- Fade To Black When Blanking
- If selected, then when the screensaver activates, the current contents of
the screen will fade to black instead of simply winking out. (Note: this
doesn't work with all X servers.) A fade will also be done when switching
graphics hacks (when the Cycle After expires.)
- Unfade From Black When Unblanking
- The complement to Fade Colormap: if selected, then when the
screensaver deactivates, the original contents of the screen will fade in
from black instead of appearing immediately. This is only done if Fade
Colormap is also selected.
- Fade Duration
- When fading or unfading are selected, this controls how long the fade will
take.
- Install Colormap
- On 8-bit screens, whether to install a private colormap while the
screensaver is active, so that the graphics hacks can get as many colors
as possible. This does nothing if you are running in 16-bit or
better.
There are more settings than these available, but these are the most commonly
used ones; see the manual for
xscreensaver(1) for other parameters that
can be set by editing the
~/.xscreensaver file, or the X resource
database.
COMMAND-LINE OPTIONS¶
xscreensaver-demo accepts the following command line options.
- -display host:display.screen
- The X display to use. The xscreensaver-demo program will open its
window on that display, and also control the xscreensaver daemon
that is managing that same display.
- -prefs
- Start up with the Advanced tab selected by default instead of the
Display Modes tab.
- -debug
- Causes lots of diagnostics to be printed on stderr.
It is important that the
xscreensaver and
xscreensaver-demo
processes be running on the same machine, or at least, on two machines that
share a file system. When
xscreensaver-demo writes a new version of the
~/.xscreensaver file, it's important that the
xscreensaver see
that same file. If the two processes are seeing different
~/.xscreensaver files, things will malfunction.
ENVIRONMENT¶
- DISPLAY
- to get the default host and display number.
- PATH
- to find the sub-programs to run. However, note that the sub-programs are
actually launched by the xscreensaver daemon, not by
xscreensaver-demo itself. So, what matters is what $PATH
that the xscreensaver program sees.
- HOME
- for the directory in which to read and write the .xscreensaver
file.
- XENVIRONMENT
- to get the name of a resource file that overrides the global resources
stored in the RESOURCE_MANAGER property.
- HTTP_PROXY or http_proxy
- to get the default HTTP proxy host and port.
UPGRADES¶
The latest version of xscreensaver, an online version of this manual, and a FAQ
can always be found at
http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/
SEE ALSO¶
X(1),
xscreensaver(1),
xscreensaver-command(1),
xscreensaver-getimage(1),
xscreensaver-text(1)
COPYRIGHT¶
Copyright © 1992-2013 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.
AUTHOR¶
Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>, 13-aug-92.
Please let me know if you find any bugs or make any improvements.