I have been busy coding a splash app in C for Linux (or other UNIX like OS) that is designed to be simple, light weight yet “pretty”. It uses the Xlib and Cairo libraries and stripped, the binary is only 11k.
There really aren’t many light-weight options for a general purpose splash message app, for what I want anyway. Sure there is zenity, yad, Xdialog, gtkdialog (all dependent on gtk), xmessage, yaf-splash (Xlib) and others like Kdialog (KDE) and probably a bunch more but all of those are either too complex or don’t do what I want without some convoluted scripting techniques which slow things down and introduce margin for error. I wanted something simple that only needs to display a few words with a coloured background indicating what kind of message we are displaying, preferably with an appropriate icon . It had to display in a prominent position on screen (adjustable of course) and with no window decoration. It had to support all fonts so had to be unicode compliant. It had to have a variable timeout, without resorting to hacks like this:
splash-message "bla bla bla" & pid=$! sleep 5 kill -9 $pid
So, like all hackers, if you can’t find the tool, make the tool! cairo-msg was born!
Check it out on my GitHub page.
NB: This is tested in Slackware64-14.1 (KDE), Slackware-14.1 (Cinnamon) and Slacko Puppy Linux (64 and 32 running JWM).
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