1 XACURSOR Set an animated cursor in a window SYNOPSIS $ xacursor [-d display] [-r] [-fg color] [-bg color] [-path directory] [-cursor file] [-mask file] [-wait msecond] [-m swing | random | rswing | vibrate] [-demo] [-h] [file] 2 DESCRIPTION Upon execution, the cursor will be changed to a musical note, the window then selected by the user will have its cursor changed to an animated one, using the paths of the cursor bitmap files listed in -file. If the -r option is specified, the cursor of the root window will be changed. If -cursor file are passed in the command line, the cursor will be changed to the one specified. -demo shows the standard demonstration. Please note that not all windows allow you to make a cursor change. By default, xacursor sets the cursor to be the bitmaps in the sequence listed in "file", which are specified in the following manner: cursor[1] mask[1] foreground[1] background[1] cursor[2] mask[2] foreground[2] background[2] . . . . . . . . cursor[n] mask[n] foreground[n] background[n] where "cursor[i]" and "mask[i]" are the paths of the cursor file and the mask file; "foreground[i]" and "background[i]" are the foreground and background colors, so the cursor can have changing colors. If omited, the mask is defaulted to be the cursor file; the two colors are set to be black and white respectively, unless otherwise specified by the user. xacursor ignores all blank lines, spaces and tabs; lines beginning with the "#" character are comments. All tokens "NA" are treated as place holder and will be ignored as well, so if one does not want to specified the mask file, the line may look like: e.g. fire1.xbm NA goldenrod midnightblue 2 OPTIONS -d display Specifies the display that should be used. -r The cursor of the root window will be changed, the user will not be asked to specified a window. -fg color The foreground color of the cursor, defaulted to be black. -bg color The background color of the cursor, defaulted to be white. -cursor file Using this option, the user can set the cursor to "file", which is not animated. -mask file The path of the mask file, defaulted to be the cursor file if omited. In the case of multiple cursors (as listed in "file"}, it serves as the default mask file for all cursors, unless it is otherwise specified in the cursor list. -path directory The directory in which all the specified bitmaps can be found, so the user does not need to type the full path of the bitmap files. This path is optional. -mode swing | random | rswing | vibrate The way the cursors are animated. By default, the cursor will be animated in the sequence "first to last" as specified in "file". "swing" mode makes the cursors changes from the 1st one to the last one, go back to the 1st one in reverse order, then start from the 1st one again; and so on and so forth. While "random" mode makes them appear in random orders. "rswing" is just swing except the cursors changes from the 1st one to one that is picked at random, go back to the 1st one in reverse order; then start again from the 1st one. Being a little like "rswing", "vibrate" picks 2 random bitmap "a" and "b" when starts, change the bitmap from "a" to "b"; then picks another random bitmap "c", and goes from "b" to "c", and so on. -wait msecond Wait for "msecond" number of milli- seconds between successive changes of the cursor. By default, "msecond" cannot be smaller then 10, otherwise 10 will be used. The default is 200 msec. -demo Show the standard demonstration, which is a rotating earth. This can be combined with other options like "-fg", "-mode" and "-wait" to get a unique appearance. -h Display the help message. 2 FILE file The cursor list, contains relative pathnames of cursors to be animated, subject to the presence or absence of "-path", as specified above. 2 AUTHOR xacursor is written by Kam-Hung WONG (k2wong@noether.math.uwaterloo.ca), 4th year Computer Science student at University of Waterloo, Canada. (WWW: http://www.undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca/~k2wong) Thanks goes to Victor S. H. Wong and Hilda Lee, for their fine efforts of drawing many interesting bitmaps for demonstration purposes. This is a small work, but I would like to dedicate it to friends at the Faculty of Mathematics, because of whom these years become so memorable. Further improvements to the application will be made, if the author survives the Real-time Programming course. :-) 2 VMS_PORT Patrick Moreau, CENA/Athis-Mons - FRANCE (pmoreau@cena.dgac.fr)