gromit-mpx1

Usage

Overview

Gromit-MPX enables you to make multi-pointer annotations on your screen. It can run in the background and be activated on demand to let you draw over all your currently running applications. The drawing will stay on screen as long as you want, you can continue to use your applications while the drawing is visible.
Gromit-MPX is XInput-Aware, so if you have a graphic tablet you can draw lines with different strength, colour, erase things, etc.
Since you typically want to use the program you are demonstrating and highlighting something is a short interruption of you workflow, Gromit-MPX is activated by either a hotkey or a repeated invocation of Gromit-MPX (the latter can e.g. used by other applications or your windowmanager).

Keyboard control

By default, Gromit-MPX grabs the "F9" key (this can be changed using the "--key" option), making it unavailable to other application. The available shortcuts are:

Options (startup)

A short summary of the available commandline arguments for invoking Gromit-MPX, see below for the options to control an already running Gromit-MPX process:

-a, --active

start Gromit-MPX and immediately activate it.

-d, --debug

gives some debug output.

-k <keysym>, --key <keysym>

will change the key used to grab the mouse. <keysym> can e.g. be "F9", "F12", "Control_R" or "Print". To determine the keysym for different keys you can use the xev(1) command. You can specify "none" to prevent Gromit-MPX from grabbing a key.

-K <keycode>, --keycode <keycode>

will change the key used to grab the mouse. Under rare circumstances identifying the key with the keysym can fail. You can then use the keycode to specify the key uniquely. To determine the keycode for different keys you can use the xev(1) command.

-o, --opacity <value>

will set the initial opacity of the window using a floating point value between 0 and 1.

-u <keysym>, --undo-key <keysym>

will change the key used to undo/redo strokes. <keysym> can e.g. be "F9", "F12", "Control_R" or "Print". To determine the keysym for different keys you can use the xev(1) command. You can specify "none" to prevent Gromit-MPX from grabbing a key.

-U <keycode>, --undo-keycode <keycode>

will change the key used to undo/redo strokes. Under rare circumstances identifying the key with the keysym can fail. You can then use the keycode to specify the key uniquely. To determine the keycode for different keys you can use the xev(1) command.

-V, --version

will show the Gromit-MPX version.

Options (control)

A sort summary of the available commandline arguments to control an already running Gromit-MPX process, see above for the options available to start Gromit-MPX.

Environment

XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP

Gromit-MPX uses this to determine which desktop environment it is running on.

XDG_CURRENT_SESSION

Gromit-MPX uses this to determine whether is is running under X11 or Wayland.

XDG_CONFIG_HOME

Directory to search for user's custom configuration file, defaults to ~/.config/.

GDK_CORE_DEVICE_EVENTS

If set, GDK does not use the XInput extension and only reacts to core X input events. This renders Gromit-MPX unusable, it will detect this and bail out with an error message.

Files

gromit-mpx.cfg

Configuration file which defines pens and maps mouse buttons and modifiers to them. Searched for in user's custom configuration file directory and, if not found there, in /etc/gromit-mpx/.