x11-overlay

This is a tiny program that displays the content of text files as an overlay on your desktop.
Its goal is simplicity, a non-distracting visualization and especially it should not interfere with user interactions targeting the underlying content.

It is designed as a front-end tool to show alarms or the health status of any system. To do so, just write your custom script that generates and updates a text file with the information you want to be displayed. Use this file as input for x11-overlay and that's it. But of course, it's absolutely not limited to alarming dashboards. Be creative!

Features

Simple and easy to use text input files (WYSIWYG)
Don't disturb (not in taskbar nor in task-switcher)
Don't interfere (delegate all user interactions to underlying elements)
Screen selection for multi-monitor setup
Colorized text with Ansi Escape Sequences.
Supported are the well known color formats for 3-4bit, 8bit and 24bit (see SGR).

Installation

Dependencies

debian/ubuntu:

$> apt install libx11-dev libxfixes-dev libxrandr-dev libxft-dev libfreetype-dev

arc/manjaro:

$> pacman -S libx11 libxfixes libxrandr libxft freetype2

Compile

$> make && ./bin/run_tests

Usage

usage: overlay [OPTIONS] <INPUT_FILE>

OPTIONS:
  -c <file>           file path to read configuration from
  -d <percent>        how much the window dims on mouse over; defaults to '75'%
  -e <pixel>          screen edge spacing in pixels; defaults to '0'
  -f <name>           font name; defaults to 'NotoSansMono'
  -h                  prints this help text
  -l <pixel>          line spacing in pixels; defaults to '0'
  -m <index>          monitor to use; defaults to '0'
  -o <value>          orientation to align window and lines; defaults to 'NW'
                      possible values are N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW and CENTER
  -p <value>          profile for ansi colors; values are VGA or XP
  -s <size>           font size; defaults to '12'
  -t <pixel>          tolerance in pixel for mouse over dimming; defaults to '0'
  -v                  be verbose and print some debug output

Fonts

The overlay tool uses the FreeType font rasterizer to render fonts. Therefore all available fonts on your system can be listed using the fontconfig tools (e.g. fc-list).

So here is an example how to display the project's ansi logo as an overlay:

install a nice looking mono space font that support charset CP437 (e.g. a classic IBM fonts from int10h.org)
find out the correct name of the (new) installed font
$> fc-list | grep -i "IBM"
/usr/local/share/fonts/m/Mx437_IBM_VGA_8x16.ttf: Mx437 IBM VGA 8x16:style=Regular
start overlay using specific font
$> ./bin/overlay -f "Mx437 IBM VGA 8x16" docs/logo.utf8.ans

abcdesktopio / x11-overlay