xantfarm(1) User Commands xantfarm(1)
NAME
xantfarm - displays a simulated ant hill in the root window
SYNOPSIS
xantfarm [
-num num] [
-c cycles] [
-id] [
checkpointfile]
DESCRIPTION
Xantfarm simulates an ant hill and displays it in the root window.
There are three
Elements in the ant world:
Air,
Dirt, and
Sand. Ants
move through
Air, dig up
Dirt, and drop it as
Sand. Ants have three
Behaviors:
Wandering,
Carrying, and
Panic. There are a few simple
probabilities built in to the program that control the transitions
between
Wandering and
Carrying. To see them
Panic, try poking the
ants with the cursor.
OPTIONS
-num Specifies how many ants to simulate. The default is 10.
-c Specifies how often the simulation runs, in cycles per second.
The default is 15. If you specify 0, it runs continuously
(and you should probably nice the
xantfarm process, or your
interactive response will suffer).
-id Forks a background process and prints the process-id to
stdout. Useful if you want to make a menu command to kill
xantfarm.
You can also specify a
checkpointfile, to restore an antfarm from
and/or periodically save the antfarm to. The format of the file is
very simple, and antfarms can easily be modified using your favorite
text editor.
Xantfarm accepts all the usual X flags and resources, plus:
-air /
airColor: The color of
Air.
-sand /
sandColor: The color of
Sand.
-ant /
antColor: The color of the ants.
There's no flag for controlling the color of
Dirt because
Dirt shows
as the default background pixmap.
BUGS / DEFICIENCIES It might be nice to be able to adjust the probabilities and stuff
with flags.
The checkpointing code could be more robust.
SEE ALSO
xsetroot(1)
AUTHOR
Copyright (C) 1991 by Jef Poskanzer <jef@acme.com>. All rights
reserved.
16 October 1991 xantfarm(1)
