autrimpo/ghosd

A simple, dynamic OSD.

ghosd is a customizable On Screen Display built with Unix philosophy in mind. Not quite suckless, but in similar spirit.

Design philosophy

The main goal of ghosd is to be simple yet powerful enough to cover a wide variety of use cases. It should provide the user with the capabilities to display the information they want in the way they want it.

ghosd has no config file, instead being controlled completly through a named pipe. This allows for great flexibility and integration with other tools and languages.

Usage

A named pipe is created at a specified location, defaulting to /tmp/ghosd-fifo.
Commands are written to this pipe delimited by a newline \n character.
If a command requires an argument, the argument follows the command on a separate line.

An example sequence, setting the background color and showing the osd window:

window-color
FF00AAFF
show

For a complete command and usage reference, see the USAGE file.

The default values for all the settings can be changed in config.h.

Building

Building ghosd requires the following dependencies:

• xcb

• xcb-ewmh

• cairo

• pango

It uses the Meson build system, so an example build might look like this:

cd ghosd
meson build
cd build
ninja

Credits

Inspired by mmkeyosd.
Ghost cat pixel art created by MarsCat.