KALEID

Section: User Commands (1)
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NAME

kaleid - X11 Kaleidoscope Display

SYNOPSIS

kaleid: [-display displayname] [-bg background] [-bd border] [-bw borderwidth] [-geometry geometry] [-delay msec] [-icondelay msec] [-iconic] [-mono] [-mult number] [-r] [-randomcolor]

HP-UX COMPATIBILITY

Origin:: User Contributed

DESCRIPTION

Kaleid is an X11 port of Judson McClendon's EGA/VGA Kaleidoscope program from the PC community. Kaleid runs a colorful kaleidoscope display in an X11 window. The 16-color palette is chosen to approximate the default palette found on EGA and VGA displays.

With window managers that support icon windows (such as uwm), the kaleid icon is a small kaleidoscope window that runs a slow kaleidoscope display (see -icondelay option, below).

Options:

-display: Specify display on which to run; defaults to contents of DISPLAY environment variable.
-bg: Specify background color; defaults to black.
-bd: Specify border color; defaults to white.
-bw: Specify border width in pixels; defaults to 2.
-geometry: Specify window geometry; defaults to =300x300+0+0.
-delay: Specify a delay (in msec) to be performed between drawing each set of lines --- can be used to avoid swamping the X11 server. Defaults to 10 (100 when -r option, below, is used).
-icondelay: Specify the delay to be used when drawing to the kaleid icon. Defaults to 100 msec.
-iconic: Cause kaleid to come up in the iconic state.
-mono: Force kaleid to run in monochrome mode (default behavior on a monochrome display).
-mult: Run specified number of kaleid windows. Each window is a top-level window with an associated icon. See the note on WINDOW MANAGER INTERACTIONS (below) for details on where the multiple windows get mapped.
-r: Run kaleid in the root window. This option causes kaleid to ignore all options irrelevant to running in the root window.
-randomcolor: Instead of the standard palette, use a randomly-generated palette that is randomly changed at times during kaleid's execution. This option causes kaleid to allocate read/write color cells instead of read-only color cells, and will not work on a display whose default visual type is StaticColor, StaticGray, or TrueColor.

NOTE

Specifying a delay (icondelay) value of 0 will cause kaleid to draw into its window (icon) at top speed, bogging down your server and, if kaleid is run remotely, your network. The default delay value was chosen to work well on a fast CPU with a fast X server -- it is probably too low for many systems.

If kaleid and the server are running on the same CPU, running kaleid with a higher nice (nice(1)) value will usually produce good results without 1) swamping the server, and 2) requiring you to impose an unpleasantly long delay.

AUTHORSHIP

There have been many different kaleidoscope programs for many different flavors of computers and PCs over the years. This program was modified from the public-domain kaleidoscope program for IBM PCs by Judson D. McClendon (Sun Valley Systems, 329 37th Court N.E., Birmingham, AL, 35215, CompuServe address [74415,1003]). The port to X11 was performed by Nathan Meyers of Hewlett-Packard (nathanm@hp-pcd.hp.com).

WINDOW MANAGER INTERACTIONS

Some window managers do not appear to cope very well with window icons, resulting in strange icon behavior. Uwm does not suffer from this problem, although problems can occur when changing window managers (to or from uwm) during execution of kaleid.

On window managers that support window icons and that specify icon sizing hints, kaleid will respect the icon sizing hints, creating the largest permissible icon. Without icon sizing hints, the default icon size is 64x64.

Kaleid maps all of its top-level windows to =+0+0 unless overridden by a geometry string, and all of its icon windows to =+0+0. Where the windows and icons actually end up is a function of how your window manager handles placement of windows and icons. Uwm, for example, will request manual window placement for each top-level window if a geometry string is not specified, but will leave all icons mapped at =+0+0. Conversely, with window managers that maintain galleries or grids of icons, multiple kaleid icons can be spectacular.

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 19:06:01 GMT, February 02, 2023