sm - Displays a short text fullscreen
sm [ OPTIONS ] [ text | - ]
Screen Message will display a given multi-line
message as large as possible, fullscreen and black on white. You can specify
the text either when launching sm, or edit it while the program is
running.
After a short timeout, the text entry and the quit button will
disappear, leaving nothing on the screen but the entered text. To continue
entering text, just start typing or (left-)click anywhere on the screen.
To clear the displayed text, press Escape.
To invert the colors of the text and the background, press
Ctrl-I.
To quit the program, press Ctrl-Q, or Escape twice, or click the
"Quit"-button.
- [ text | - ]
- Text to display at start up. Defaults to ":-)". If
"-" is passed to sm, it will read the text to display
from the standard input, see REMOTE CONTROLLING SM.
- -f, --foreground=colordesc
- Define a different color to use for the foreground of the text to display
than black. The text string can be in any of the forms accepted by
XParseColor; these include name for a color from rgb.txt, such as
DarkSlateGray, or a hex specification such as #3050b2 or #35b.
- -b, --background=colordesc
- Define a different color to use for the background of the text to display
than white. For possible values, see above.
- -i, --invert
- Switch the roles for foreground and background colors. Useful if you
prefer white-on-black.
- -n, --font=fontspec
- Define a different font to use than the default sans-serif font of your
system. The fontspec be the complete name for a truetype font (like
"DejaVu Sans" or "Bitstream Vera Serif") or just a
short font family specification ("serif",
"sans-serif").
- -r, --rotate=rotation
- Rotates the display by rotation*90 degrees counter-clock-wise. So -r 1
rotates the display to the left, and -r 2 puts it upside down.
- -a, --align=alignment
- Aligns the text centered (-a 0), left (-a 1) or right (-a 2).
- --
- (Double dash) End option parsing. This is used to be able to actually hand
over text that starts of with an dash.
- -h, --help
- This option will give you a short usage message summarizing the recognized
options and quits.
- -V, --version
- This prints the project name together with its version number quits.
If sm is called with - as a command line argument, it will
read the text to be shown from the standard input. It will read the input
until it reaches the end of the file, or the form feed character \f,
and show the input read so far at once. Newline characters at the beginning
or the end are ignored. The input is assumed to be UTF-8 encoded (see
utf8(7)).
This can be used to create automatic displays of changing data or
similar tricks. For example, the following command will create a simple
digital watch:
(while sleep 1; do date +%T; printf \\f; done) | sm -
This manual page was written by Joachim Breitner
<mail@joachim-breitner.de> and updated by Gerfried Fuchs
<rhonda@deb.at> to reflect additions for commandline option
handling.