The phosphor program draws text on the screen in a very large
pixellated font that looks like an old low resolution dumb tty. The
pixels flare and fade out as if the phosphor was very long-sustain.
OPTIONS
phosphor
accepts the following options:
-window
Draw on a newly-created window. This is the default.
-root
Draw on the root window.
-install
Install a private colormap for the window.
-visual visual
Specify which visual to use. Legal values are the name of a visual class,
or the id number (decimal or hex) of a specific visual.
-font font-name
The X font to use. Phosphor can take any font and scale it up to pixellate
it. The default is fixed.
-scale int
How much to scale the font up: in other words, the size in real pixels of
the simulated pixels. Default 6.
-ticks int
The number of colors to use when fading to black. Default 20.
-delay usecs
The speed of the terminal: how long to wait between drawing each character.
Default 50000, or about 1/20th second.
-program sh-command
The command to run to generate the text to display. This option may be
any string acceptable to /bin/sh. The program will be run at the end of
a pipe, and any characters that it prints to stdout will be printed
on phosphor's window. The characters will be printed artificially slowly,
as per the -delay option above. If the program exits, it will be
launched again after 5 seconds.
Note that phosphor is not a terminal emulator: programs that try to
directly address the screen will not do what you might expect. Phosphor
merely draws the characters on the screen left to right, top to bottom.
Lines wrap when they reach the right edge, and the screen scrolls when
characters reach the bottom.
In other words, programs like
fortune(1)
will work, but programs like
top(1)
won't.
Here's a good trick, to get phosphor to display recent web search terms: