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 explicitly 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                               GROMIT(1)