XScreenBane - the bane of boredom for your screen

This is a set of additional hacks for XScreenSaver.

More specifically, this is a Clojure project that intends to work well with XScreenSaver on Linux and Mac, while making the hacks easier to code.

Beyond that, I wanted to explore using live data to drive the hacks instead of just using randomness to make them interesting.

I would love your feedback here or on Mastodon @nundrum@theatl.social as well as contributions of hacks and data sources.

Installation

Download the jar and place it somewhere convenient.

Edit your .xscreensaver config file and add the hacks you want to the list of programs:

programs:								       \
			"arcs" 	java -jar ./bin/xscreenbane.jar arcs	     \n\
		  "arp-sigils" 	java -jar ./bin/xscreenbane.jar arp-sigils   \n\
		 "dirty-window"	java -jar ./bin/xscreenbane.jar dirty-window \n\

Status

Generally, this is working for me on a variety of Linux machines. It is untested on Macs, and the arp-sigils hack is the one currently set up to work well cross-platform.

Performance hasn’t been tested, but that is planned in the future.

Occasionally the JVM process hangs after recieving SIGTERM.

Development

There are two template hacks in src/xscreenbane/hacks. One of them is set up to use only AWT libraries. The other includes Clojure2D. Using only AWT results in slighty faster load times, but is harder to work with.

Just copy one of the templates to a new file and adjust the namespace line in it. There are only two functions required:

• setup-state - this will be called once so your hack can initialize the @hackstate atom.

• draw - this will be called in a loop for rendering the next frame.