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) define 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/xpenguins.
-d display, --display display
Send the toons to the specified X display. In the absence of this option, the dis‐
play specified 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 se‐
lect 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 window 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 option can be called multiple times to run several themes simultane‐
ously.
-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 win‐
dow 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 exceeds 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 aug‐
mented 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 directory 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 information 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 different 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 description 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 depending 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 default); any properties (such as width and speed) set here
are then adopted by the activities defined from then on, if they do not themselves
explicitly define those properties. After an activity has been declared with de‐
fine, the following properties may be assigned:
pixmap xpmfile
The file containing the image data for the activity. Note that you may not set a de‐
fault 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 com‐
plete 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 ex‐
plosion 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 XPenguins 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, fol‐
lowed by the corresponding 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
address 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
suitable 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 dis‐
played 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://pingus.seul.org/>; these images were designed by Joel Fauche
<joel.fauche@wanadoo.fr> and Craig Timpany <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/share/xpenguins/themes/*
Remember used flags: $HOME/.xpenguinsrc
/proc/loadavg
SEE ALSO
xsnow(6), xroach(1), xwininfo(1), pingus(6)
XPenguins 3.2.4 January 2026 XPenguins(1)
