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.