Provided by: sm_0.20-2_amd64 
NAME
sm - Displays a short text fullscreen
SYNOPSIS
sm [ OPTIONS ] [ text | - ]
DESCRIPTION
Screen Message will display a given multi-line message as large as possible, fullscreen and black on
white. You can specify the text either when launching sm, or edit it while the program is running.
After a short timeout, the text entry and the quit button will disappear, leaving nothing on the screen
but the entered text. To continue entering text, just start typing or (left-)click anywhere on the
screen.
To clear the displayed text, press Escape.
To quit the program, press Ctrl-Q, or Escape twice, or click the "Quit"-button.
OPTIONS
[ text | - ]
Text to display at start up. Defaults to ":-)". If "-" is passed to sm, it will read the text to
display from the standard input, see REMOTE CONTROLLING SM.
-f, --foreground=colordesc
Define a different color to use for the foreground of the text to display than black. The text
string can be in any of the forms accepted by XParseColor; these include name for a color from
rgb.txt, such as DarkSlateGray, or a hex specification such as #3050b2 or #35b.
-b, --background=colordesc
Define a different color to use for the background of the text to display than white. For possible
values, see above.
-n, --font=fontspec
Define a different font to use than the default sans-serif font of your system. The fontspec be
the complete name for a truetype font (like "DejaVu Sans" or "Bitstream Vera Serif") or just a
short font family specification ("serif", "sans-serif").
-r, --rotate=rotation
Rotates the display by rotation*90 degrees counter-clock-wise. So -r 1 rotates the display to the
left, and -r 2 puts it upside down.
-- (Double dash) End option parsing. This is used to be able to actually hand over text that starts
of with an dash.
-h, --help
This option will give you a short usage message summarizing the recognized options and quits.
-V, --version
This prints the project name together with its version number quits.
REMOTE CONTROLLING SM
If sm is called with - as a command line argument, it will read the text to be shown from the standard
input. It will read the input until it reaches the end of the file, or the line feed character \f, and
show the input read so far at once. Newline characters at the beginning or the end are ignored. The input
is assumed to be UTF-8 encoded (see utf8(7)).
This can be used to create automatic displays of changing data or similar tricks. For example, the
following command will create a simple digital watch:
(while sleep 1; do date +%T; echo -e '\f'; done) | sm -
AUTHOR
This manual page was written by Joachim Breitner <mail@joachim-breitner.de> and updated by Gerfried Fuchs <rhonda@deb.at> to reflect additions for commandline option handling. August 05, 2008 SM(6)