tty-clock: 6.9 on the Geek-o-meter

This is a little something that everyone should have, if they even consider life at the terminal.

I went on a rampage searching for tty-clock after seeing it in a screenshot or two of some dvm and awesome setups. Or maybe they were xmonad. Or maybe. …

Anyways, it is ubelievably hard to track down an application by its screenshot, when you don’t know the name of it and there are no title bars to guide you. Luckily, somewhere along the line, the name tty-clock came up.

And for a terminal system, it’s pretty cool. The needle on the geek-o-meter tips way to the right when this is on your desktop, particularly if you throw in something like cmatrix at the same time.

Installing it is almost primitive; download the tarball, decompress and make. I haven’t bothered scraping together a Pkgfile for this, because it’s almost as easy as compiling an autologin. And once it’s made, you can stash it anywhere you like. Put it in your path, put it in your home directory — whatever.

Note that it has a centering option, a bouncing version, a 12-hour option and a few other minor adjustments. It needs a few things too — like a way to adjust the date display outside of editing the source code. (I prefer year-month-day, if you don’t quite get my meaning.)

It’s possible that this is already in some distros — I couldn’t find it in Arch or AUR, and those folks are usually riding the sharp edge of the software release schedule. If it’s out there under another name and I just don’t know about it, please fill me in. It won’t be the first time I’ve been late to the party, and it sure won’t be the last.

Otherwise, enjoy. 🙂