Xpenguins - man page
XPenguins(1) General Commands Manual XPenguins(1)
NAME
xpenguins - cute little penguins that walk along the tops of your windows
SYNOPSIS
xpenguins [-option ...]
DESCRIPTION
XPenguins is a program for animating cute cartoons/animals in your root window. By default it will
be penguins - they drop in from the top of the screen, walk along the tops of your windows, up the
side of your windows, levitate, skateboard, and do other similarly exciting things. Be careful when
you move windows as the little guys squash easily. XPenguins is now themeable, so it is easy to
select something else to animate instead of penguins, or even (with a little artistic talent) de‐
fine your own; see the THEMES section below.
OPTIONS
In all the following cases a double dash can be replaced by a single dash.
-a, --no-angels
Do not show any cherubim flying up to heaven when a toon gets squashed.
-b, --no-blood
Do not show any gory death sequences.
-c dir, --config-dir dir
Look for config files and themes in this directory. The default is usually /usr/share/xpen‐
guins.
-d display, --display display
Send the toons to the specified X display. In the absence of this option, the display spec‐
ified by the DISPLAY environment variable is used.
-h, --help
Print out a message describing the available options.
--defaults
Skip reading from ~/.xpenguinrc
--nomenu
Do not show menu
--nodoublebuffer
Do not use double buffering
--hidemenu
Iconify menu at startup
-i, --theme-info
Print out the auxiliary information about a theme and exit. Use the -t option to select the
theme to describe.
--random-theme
Start with a random theme.
-l, --list-themes
List the available themes, one on each line, and exit.
-m delay, --delay delay
Set the delay between each frame in milliseconds. The default is defined by the theme.
-n number, --penguins number
The number of toons to start, up to a maximum of 512. The default is defined by the theme.
-p, --ignorepopups
Toons fall through `popup' windows (those with the save-under attribute set), such as
tooltips. Note that this also includes the KDE panel.
-r, --rectwin
Toons regard all windows as rectangular. This option results in faster calculation of win‐
dow positions, but if you use one of those fancy new window managers with shaped windows
then your toons might sometimes look like they're walking on thin air.
-s, --squish
Enable the penguins to be squished using any of the mouse buttons. Note that this disables
any existing function of the mouse buttons on the root window.
--lift number
Lift penguins window number pixels, e.g. to keep above a panel.
-t theme, --theme theme
Use the named theme. The default is Penguins. If the theme has spaces in its name then you
can use underscores instead, or alternatively just put the name in double quotes. This op‐
tion can be called multiple times to run several themes simultaneously.
-q, --quiet
Suppress the exit message when an interrupt is received.
-v, --version
Print out the current version number and quit.
--all Load all available themes and run them simultaneously.
--id window
Send toons to the window with this ID, instead of the root window or whichever window is
appropriate for the current desktop environment. Note that the ID of X clients reported by
xwininfo is rarely that of the foremost visible window that should be used here.
--nice loadaverage1 loadaverage2
Start killing toons when the 1-min averaged system load exceeds loadaverage1; when it ex‐
ceeds loadaverage2 kill them all. The toons will reappear when the load average comes down.
The load is checked every 5 seconds by looking in /proc/loadavg, so this option only works
under unices that implement this particular pseudo file (probably just Linux). When there
are no toons on the screen, XPenguins uses only a minuscule amount of CPU time - it just
wakes up every 5 seconds to recheck the load.
--changelog
Show ChangeLog
--selfrep
Put source in the form of a gzipped tar file on stdout.
THEMES
The system themes are usually kept in /usr/share/xpenguins/themes, and these can be augmented or
overridden by the user's themes in $HOME/.xpenguins/themes. Each theme has its own subdirectory
which to be valid must contain a file called config. The name of the theme is taken from the di‐
rectory name, although because many install scripts choke on directory names containing spaces, all
spaces in a theme name are represented in the directory name by underscores. Any directory name
containing spaces is inaccessible by xpenguins.
In addition to the config file, the theme directory contains the toon images that make up the theme
in the form of xpm image files. Additionally, there should be an about file which gives informa‐
tion on the creator of the theme, the license under which it is distributed and various other
things. This file is principally for use by xpenguins_applet, an applet for GNOME that allows dif‐
ferent themes to be selected at the click of a button.
The config file has a reasonably straightforward format. You can either read this rather terse de‐
scription of it or you can have a look at the config file for the default Penguins theme, which is
usually installed at /usr/share/xpenguins/themes/Penguins/config, and is reasonably well commented.
We'll first establish some simple terminology. Say you have a Farmyard theme with cows and sheep.
The cows and sheep are types of toon, while the various things they get up to (walking, mooing and
so on) are termed activities. Each activity has its own xpm image file, in which the frames of the
animation are laid out horizontally. Some activities (notably walking) use different images depend‐
ing on the direction the toon is moving in. In this case the frames for the two directions are laid
out one above the other in the image.
As in shell scripts, comments are initiated with the # character and hide the remainder of the
line. The format is entirely free except that there is an arbitrary limit on the length of a line
of 512 characters. Spaces, tabs and newlines all count equally as white space. Data is entered as
a sequence of key value pairs, all separated by white space. Neither the keys nor the values are
case sensitive, except where the value is a filename. The following keys are understood:
delay delay
Set the recommended delay between frames in milliseconds.
toon toon
Begin defining a new toon called toon. If only one type of toon is present in the theme
then this key may be omitted.
number number
Set the default number of toons of the current type to start.
define activity
Begin defining an activity for the current toon. The currently understood activities are
walker, faller, tumbler, climber, floater, runner, explosion, squashed, zapped, splatted,
angel, exit and action?, where ? is a number between 0 and 6. Once you've seen the program
in action you should be able to guess which is which. A valid theme must contain at least
walkers and fallers. Additionally, you may define a default activity (with define de‐
fault); any properties (such as width and speed) set here are then adopted by the activi‐
ties defined from then on, if they do not themselves explicitly define those properties.
After an activity has been declared with define, the following properties may be assigned:
pixmap xpmfile
The file containing the image data for the activity. Note that you may not set a default
pixmap.
width width
The width of each frame of the animation in pixels.
height height
The height of each frame of the animation in pixels.
frames frames
The number of frames in the animation.
directions directions
The number of directions for the activity (can be 1 or 2).
speed speed
The initial speed of the toon when engaged in this activity, in pixels per frame.
acceleration acceleration
The rate at which the speed increases, in pixels per frame squared. This property is not
utilised by all activities.
terminal_velocity terminal_velocity
The maximum speed in pixels per frame, again not utilised by all activities.
loop loop
Only understood by the actions; indicates how many times to repeat the action. If negative,
then the probility of stopping the action every time the action is complete is -1/loop.
Some notes regarding the various activities. If you design a new theme, feel free to make the
splatted, squashed, zapped and exit animations as gory and bloody as you like, but please keep the
explosion activity nice and tame; that way those of a nervous disposition can employ the --no-blood
option which replaces all these violent deaths with a tasteful explosion that wouldn't offend your
grandmother. Xpm images files are a factor of two smaller if you can limit the number of colours in
the image such that only one character need be used to represent each colour; this also makes XPen‐
guins start up much more rapidly. Rarely are more than 64 colours required.
So that's about it for the config file, now for the about file. This is very simple. Again comments
are initialised by a #. An entry consists of a key at the start of a line, followed by the corre‐
sponding value which is read up to the next newline. The following keys are understood, although
none are compulsory.
artist Used to list the artist(s) who created the original images.
maintainer
The person who compiled the images into an XPenguins theme. It is useful if an email ad‐
dress can also be provided.
date The date when the theme was last modified. My preferred format is day of the month, name of
the month in english, full year. For example: 24 April 2001.
icon The name of an image file that can be used as an icon for the theme; XPM and PNG are suit‐
able formats.
license The name of the license under which the theme is distributed (e.g. GPL).
copyright
The year and holder of the copyright.
comment Any other essential information, such as the theme's web site, as brief as possible.
Please test any about files you create by looking at how the information is displayed by
the xpenguins_applet program.
AUTHOR
Robin Hogan <R.J.Hogan@reading.ac.uk>.
CREDITS
Inspiration provided by Rick Jansen <rick@sara.nl> in the form of the classic xsnow. Most penguin
images were taken from Pingus, a free lemmings clone that can be found at <http://pin‐
gus.seul.org/>; these images were designed by Joel Fauche <joel.fauche@wanadoo.fr> and Craig Tim‐
pany <timpany@es.co.nz>. Additional images in version 2 by Rob Gietema <tycoon@planetdescent.com>
and Robin Hogan.
NOTES
XPenguins can load an X server and/or network (although the CPU time used is small), and if a large
number of penguins are spawned then they may begin to flicker, depending on the speed of the X
server.
The xpenguins homepage is located at:
version < 3.0: http://xpenguins.seul.org/
version >= 3.0: https://www.ratrabbit.nl/ratrabbit/software/xpenguins and https://source‐
forge.net/projects/xpenguins/
BUGS
If there are icons drawn on the root window then the toons will erase them when they walk over
them, although an expose event will be sent to the window every second to redraw them.
Since version 3.0, xpenguins uses, if possible, a transparent, click-through window to draw it's
toons. The --squish flag does not function in this mode.
The behaviour of the menu is not well defined when the same theme name is used more than once.
FILES
User defined themes: $HOME/.xpenguins/themes/*
System themes: /usr/local/share/xpenguins/themes/*
Remember used flags: $HOME/.xpenguinsrc
/proc/loadavg
SEE ALSO
xsnow(6), xroach(1), xwininfo(1), pingus(6)
XPenguins 3.2.3 August 2024 XPenguins(1)
