glblur(6)

glblur6

3d radial blur texture fields

Usage

glblur [--display host:display.screen] [--visual visual] [--window] [--root] [--window-id number] [--delay number] [--blursize number] [--no-wander] [--no-spin] [--spin [XYZ]] [--fps]

Overview

This program draws a box and a few line segments, and generates a radial blur outward from it. This creates flowing field effects.

This is done by rendering the scene into a small texture, then repeatedly rendering increasingly-enlarged and increasingly-transparent versions of that texture onto the frame buffer. As such, it's quite graphics intensive: don't bother trying to run this if you don't have hardware-accelerated texture support. It will hurt your machine bad.

Options

--visual visual

Specify which visual to use. Legal values are the name of a visual class, or the id number (decimal or hex) of a specific visual.

--window

Draw on a newly-created window. This is the default.

--root

Draw on the root window.

--window-id number

Draw on the specified window.

--delay number

Per-frame delay, in microseconds. Default: 10000 (0.01 seconds.).

--blursize number

How many copies of the scene should be laid down to make the vapor trail. Default: 15. Larger numbers create smoother fields, but are slower.

--wander | --no-wander

Whether the object should wander around the screen.

--spin [XYZ]

Around which axes should the object spin?

--no-spin

None.

--fps

Display the current frame rate, CPU load, and polygon count.

Environment

DISPLAY

to get the default host and display number.

XENVIRONMENT

to get the name of a resource file that overrides the global resources stored in the RESOURCE_MANAGER property.

XSCREENSAVER_WINDOW

The window ID to use with --root.

Author

Jamie Zawinski, with inspiration from a tutorial by Dario Corno.

From xscreensaver 6.15-1 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.