N.B.: Please read the wiki node for the most up-to-date information including links to source tarballs
osdhud is a heads-up display (HUD) for X windows. It uses the xosd
library to draw its display over everything else and is designed to be
trivial to integrate into whatever desktop environment you use. That
much said, I use
cwm under
OpenBSD and find it meshes perfectly with
the minimalist desktop: no fixed screen real-estate dedicated to
gauges, widgets or crud. If you want to know what's going on in your
machine, hit a key. If you want to know more there's always xterm -e systat :-).
At the moment it only works under OpenBSD. It was originally written under FreeBSD but has evolved substantially since then (as, I'm sure, has FreeBSD). Linux is a totally different kettle of fish and is unsupported at the moment but should be relatively easy to do if anyone cares.
The repository on github are synced more or less as I do things but the one on traqistan is always the most up-to-date.
Please feel free to contact me if you want to collaborate.
There is a simple configure shell script at top level. It mainly
fixes up a few things depending on the variety of make you have;
since osdhud is still an OpenBSD-only program, this is kind of dumb
but at some point it might be ported to other BSDs or Linux... who
knows. In any event, the sequence is the usual:
$ ./configure
$ make
$ doas make install
This will install osdhud in /usr/local/bin/ and osdhud.1 in
/usr/local/man/man1. You can specicy an alternate installation
prefix via the PREFIX make variable, e.g.:
$ make PREFIX=$HOME install
will install osdhud into ~/bin and osdhud.1 into ~/man/man1.
The help target gives a brief usage message for the Makefile:
$ make help
The following targets are useful:
help produce this message
all build stuff
install install everything but desktop into $(PREFIX)
clean clean up temp files
distclean clean + reset to virgin state
dist cook dist-version.tar.gz tarball
Install prefix: /usr/local (override with PREFIX=... on command-line)
bin dir: /usr/local/bin
man dir: /usr/local/man
From the source code (again, please see the wiki node for more complete information):
The idea is that just running us from a keybinding in the window
manager with no arguments should do something reasonable: the
HUD appears for a couple of seconds and fades away if nothing else
is done. If we are invoked while the HUD is still up then it will
stay up longer. This is intuitively what I want:
more hit key -> more hud
stop hit key -> no more hud
I call this the Caveman Theory of Human/Computer Interaction:
PUNCH COMPUTER TO MAKE IT GO.
The first time osdhud is invoked it will daemonize itself and listen
on a Unix-domain socket; by default it lives in your home directory.
We do this so that osdhud can keep running statistics on things like
network utilization in the background. Obviously these statistics get
better the longer osdhud runs (although at the moment I don't do too
much of that). If you want to start osdhud without bringing up the
display use the -n option; this can be useful in your ~/.xinitrc
or similar script if you don't want the HUD to come up for a few
seconds when you start X windows.
More details on the options and usage can be found in the man page; I
keep copies in pdf and html
synced with the source in OpenBSD's wonderful mandoc
semantic markup format for documentation. I run it through my Perl
@variable@ expander (generic/suss.pl) to get @VERSION@ expanded
when osdhud.1 (the final man page) is generated.
It seems de rigueur to provide a screenshot:
This display was produced by osdhud -t, which is why it says
[-stuck-] at bottom left. Without the -t the HUD will come up for
a few seconds and count down how long it will be visible at bottom
left instead.
Yeah, my poor little Thinkpad T61 (i386) gets a little hot running Firefox... s'ok, keeps me honest.