NAME
Gromit - Presentation helper to make annotations on screen
SYNOPSIS
gromit [options]
DESCRIPTION
Gromit enables you to make annotations on your screen. It can run in
the background and be activated on demand to let you draw over all your
currently running applications. The drawing will stay on screen as long
as you want, you can continue to use your applications while the
drawing is visible.
Gromit is XInput-Aware, so if you have a graphic tablet you can draw
lines with different strength, color, erase things, etc.
Since you typically want to use the program you are demonstrating and
highlighting something is a short interruption of you workflow, Gromit
is activated by either a hotkey or a repeated invokation of Gromit (the
latter can e.g. used by other applications or your windowmanager).
KEYBOARD CONTROL
By default, Gromit grabs the "Pause" key (this can be change using the
"--key" option), making it unavailable to other application. The
available shortcuts are:
Pause toggle painting
SHIFT-Pause
clear screen
CTRL-Pause
toggle visibility
ALT-Pause
quit Gromit
OPTIONS (STARTUP)
A short summary of the available commandline arguments for invoking
Gromit, see below for the options to control an already running Gromit
process:
-a, --active
start Gromit and immediately activate it.
-k <keysym>, --key <keysym>
will change the key used to grab the mouse. <keysym> can e.g. be
"Pause", "F12", "Control_R" or "Print". To determine the keysym
for different keys you can use the xev(1) command. You can
specify "none" to prevent Gromit from grabbing a key.
-K <keycode>, --keycode <keycode>
will change the key used to grab the mouse. Under rare
circumstances identifying the key with the keysym can fail. You
can then use the keycode to specify the key uniquely. To
determine the keycode for different keys you can use the xev(1)
command.
-d, --debug
gives some debug output.
OPTIONS (CONTROL)
A sort summary of the available commandline arguments to control an
already running Gromit process, see above for the options available to
start Gromit.
-q, --quit
will cause the main Gromit process to quit.
-t, --toggle
will toggle the grabbing of the cursor.
-v, --visibility
will toggle the visibility of the window.
-c, --clear
will clear the screen.
BUGS
Gromit may drastically slow down your X-Server, especially when you
draw very thin lines. It makes heavily use of the shape extension,
which is quite expensive if you paint a complex pattern on screen.
Especially terminal-programs tend to scroll incredibly slow if
something is painted over their window. There is nothing I can do about
this.
Gromit partially disables DnD, since it lays a transparent window
across the whole screen and everything gets "dropped" to this
(invisible) window. Gromit tries to minimize this effect: When you
clear the screen the shaped window will be hidden. It will be
resurrected, when you want to paint something again. However: The
window does not hide, if you erase everything with the eraser tool, you
have to clear the screen explicitely with the "gromit --clear" command
or hide Gromit with "gromit --visibility".
AUTHOR
Simon Budig <simon@gimp.org>
This manual page was written by Pierre Chifflier <chifflier@cpe.fr> and
Simon Budig.
January 16, 2005