KALEID(1)

NAME
kaleid - X11 Kaleidoscope Display

SYNOPSIS

kaleid
    [-bd border] [-bg background] [-bstore] [-bw borderwidth] [-clip x,y,w,h[,x,y,w,h[,...]]] [-colors color1[,color2[,...]]] [-delay msec] [-display displayname] [-geometry geometry] [-icondelay msec] [-iconic] [-mono] [-mult number] [-qix] [-r] [-randomcolor] [-refresh]

HP-UX COMPATIBILITY

Origin:
    User Contributed

DESCRIPTION
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:

-bd Specify border color; defaults to white.

-bg Specify background color; defaults to black.

-bstore
    Enable backing store on kaleid windows.

-bw Specify border width in pixels; defaults to 2.

-clip
    Specify clipping rectangles to be used in the kaleid window(s). You can specify one or more clipping rectangles by x, y, width, and height in floating-point coordinates. The values specified are scaled to the window size, and can range from 0.0 to 1.0. So ``-clip 0,0,1,1'' specifies the entire window, while ``-clip 0,0,.5,.5,.5,.5,.5,.5'' specifies the upper-left and lower-right quadrants of the window. Note that kaleid does not check for reasonable values, nor does it check for violation of X's requirement that clipping rectangles not overlap.

-colors
    Specify up to 16 colors to use instead of the default palette. This option is overridden by the -randomcolors option. Example of syntax: ``-colors red,green''. If a color is specified that does not exist in the server's rgb database, color allocation will silently fail.

-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).

-display
    Specify display on which to run; defaults to contents of DISPLAY environment variable.

-geometry
    Specify window geometry; defaults to =300x300+0+0.

-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.

-qix
    Run a completely different ``Qix''-type drawing algorithm instead of kaleidoscope.

-r  Run kaleid in the root window. This option causes kaleid to ignore all options irrelevant to running in the root window, with one exception: the geometry string is interpreted in a strange and different manner. The width and height are interpreted as number of horizontal and vertical sections into which the root window is divided. For example, a geometry specification of =3x2 will result in six kaleidoscope patterns laid out in a 3x2 array 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.

-refresh
    If an obscured portion a window containing a kaleid display is exposed, refresh the window. This results in redrawing everything that has been drawn since the last time the window was cleared.

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. The kaleidoscope algorithm in kaleid was derived 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]). X11 kaleid was written 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.