NAME¶
Gromit - Presentation helper to make annotations on screen
SYNOPSIS¶
gromit [
options]
DESCRIPTION¶
Gromit enables you to make annotations on your screen. It can run in the
background and be activated on demand to let you draw over all your currently
running applications. The drawing will stay on screen as long as you want, you
can continue to use your applications while the drawing is visible.
Gromit is XInput-Aware, so if you have a graphic tablet you can draw
lines with different strength, color, erase things, etc.
Since you typically want to use the program you are demonstrating and
highlighting something is a short interruption of you workflow, Gromit is
activated by either a hotkey or a repeated invokation of Gromit (the latter
can e.g. used by other applications or your windowmanager).
KEYBOARD CONTROL¶
By default, Gromit grabs the "Pause" key (this can be change using the
"--key" option), making it unavailable to other application. The
available shortcuts are:
- Pause
- toggle painting
- SHIFT-Pause
- clear screen
- CTRL-Pause
- toggle visibility
- ALT-Pause
- quit Gromit
OPTIONS (STARTUP)¶
A short summary of the available commandline arguments for invoking Gromit, see
below for the options to control an already running Gromit process:
- -a, --active
- start Gromit and immediately activate it.
- -k <keysym>, --key <keysym>
- will change the key used to grab the mouse. <keysym>
can e.g. be "Pause", "F12", "Control_R" or
"Print". To determine the keysym for different keys you can use
the xev(1) command. You can specify "none" to prevent
Gromit from grabbing a key.
- -K <keycode>, --keycode <keycode>
- will change the key used to grab the mouse. Under rare
circumstances identifying the key with the keysym can fail. You can then
use the keycode to specify the key uniquely. To determine the keycode for
different keys you can use the xev(1) command.
- -d, --debug
- gives some debug output.
OPTIONS (CONTROL)¶
A sort summary of the available commandline arguments to control an already
running Gromit process, see above for the options available to start Gromit.
- -q, --quit
- will cause the main Gromit process to quit.
- -t, --toggle
- will toggle the grabbing of the cursor.
- -v, --visibility
- will toggle the visibility of the window.
- -c, --clear
- will clear the screen.
BUGS¶
Gromit may drastically slow down your X-Server, especially when you draw very
thin lines. It makes heavily use of the shape extension, which is quite
expensive if you paint a complex pattern on screen. Especially
terminal-programs tend to scroll incredibly slow if something is painted over
their window. There is nothing I can do about this.
Gromit partially disables DnD, since it lays a transparent window across the
whole screen and everything gets "dropped" to this (invisible)
window. Gromit tries to minimize this effect: When you clear the screen the
shaped window will be hidden. It will be resurrected, when you want to paint
something again. However: The window does not hide, if you erase everything
with the eraser tool, you have to clear the screen explicitly with the
"gromit --clear" command or hide Gromit with "gromit
--visibility".
AUTHOR¶
Simon Budig <simon@gimp.org>
This manual page was written by Pierre Chifflier <chifflier@cpe.fr> and
Simon Budig.