Is there any application to display scrolling text on top of all windows in Ubuntu? Something like Tickr, but what I want is an application that can display my own text, something like
appname "my own text"then "my own text" is scrolling around the desktop. Can Tickr do that instead of RSS feed?
3 Answers
If you put the following into an .xml file and run tickr <filename>.xml, then you'll have what you want:
<rss version="0.91">
<channel>
<title>askubuntu.com is rad!</title>
</channel>
</rss>You could then have the behavior you want (i.e., running appname "my own text") by writing a script. For example, put the following into a file called my-tickr.sh:
#! /bin/bash`
echo "<rss version="0.91">" > .tmp.tickr
echo "<channel>" >> .tmp.tickr
echo "<title> $1 </title>" >>.tmp.tickr
echo "</channel>" >>.tmp.tickr
echo "</rss>" >>.tmp.tickr
tickr .tmp.tickr &Then run chmod +x my-tickr.sh to make the script executable. Then running ./my-tickr.sh 'askubuntu is rad!' should behave as desired. Note the use of single quotes around 'askubuntu is rad!': this ensures that each character in your string is interpreted literally (Thanks to January for pointing this out).
(Some extra info.)
You can just type:
tickr FILE_NAMEIn that case, the file will be processed as a simple text file, not as an XML one.
In settings, you can also enable special characters and then define one character for "tab" (eight spaces) and another one for "new page" (one empty line).
Or, with (for instance) "new page" = '#' and "tab" = "%", you can just type:
tickr -specialchars=y -newpgchar=# -tabchar=% FILE_NAMETo see how it works, try with FILE_NAME:
hello hello
%
hello hello
#
hello
%
hello
%
hello
%
helloJust re-reading my previous answer, I think I quite missed the real question. So, sorry for the mess. Now, I'm just making an alternative version of my_tickr.sh by dxvxd.
my-tickr2.sh:
#! /bin/bash
tmp_file="$(pwd)/.tmp.tickr"
echo "$1" > "$tmp_file"
tickr "$tmp_file" &(Tickr can actually read non-xml / non-rss text files directly but it needs an absolute path.)
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