xphoon(1) xphoon(1)
14 September 1991
NAME
xphoon - displays the PHase of the mOON on the root window
SYNOPSIS
xphoon [-b] [-t interval [-i]] [-display name]
DESCRIPTION
Xphoon sets the X root window to a picture of the moon in its current
phase, including the partial lighting of the dark side by reflected
earthlight.
OPTIONS
-b Defeats the earthlight feature, forcing the dark side to be
black.
-t Have xphoon keep running and update the picture every interval
minutes. (Normally, xphoon just sets the root picture and
exits.)
-i Forks a background process and prints the process-id to stdout.
Useful if you want to make menu commands to refresh or kill
xphoon.
NOTES
The original motivation for this program was that xsetroot was too
slow. Loading a full-screen bitmap took about 15 seconds. We made a
trivial program that had fullmoon.bitmap compiled in, and it ran in
less than a second. (And incidentally, the executable was smaller
than fullmoon.xbm.) Then later we came up with the phase hacking, the
earthlight, and the auto-scaling.
SEE ALSO
phoon(1), xsetroot(1)
AUTHORS
Copyright (C) 1988, 1991 by Jef Poskanzer and Craig Leres.
The moon-phase computation is from "moontool.c" by John Walker.
- 1 - Formatted: October 27, 2025
