Xsnow | Hacker News Reader

Xsnow

en.wikipedia.org

155 pointsh2odragon97 comments

I remember doing ls /usr/bin/x* and just running all of them to see what they did, there were a lot of fun things in those days.

Here's a pretty exhaustive list:

https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/

When I was a wee lad I did something similar and ended up running `getty`. Not a good idea!

You just sent me down a rabbit hole of "what was that athena-widget or athena-ish drawing program that wasn't xfig, xcircuit, or xpaint?"

I'm pretty sure what I'm remembering is tgif: http://bourbon.usc.edu/tgif/index.html

I haven't used a unix plotting package in years but it appears derivatives of grace and xgraph are still around.

I surreptitiously ran this on my wife's Linux laptop while she was using it. She called out from the other room "it's snowing on my laptop!" Thanks h2odragon and HN, I had completely forgotten xsnow existed and it made for a lovely surprise this morning. :)

Xantfarm was a particular favorite of mine. Made coming into work on a Monday morning kind of fun, to see what the ants had been up to

https://acme.com/software/xantfarm/

xroach: https://github.com/interkosmos/xroach

Came here to reminisce about xroach.

Back in the day, it wasn't uncommon that the security configuration of an X workstation was open to external windows/display. e.g. you could run a program on your system, but target your neighbor's display.

I think universities did this to make it easier to help/troubleshoot a workstation remotely, but once you figured out the commands, xroach was one of my favorites to run on another machine.

It was just the default setup for X in general. You had to lock it down to avoid it. My goodness that was sooo much fun though. ;-)

If you're like me and this doesn't work because you've moved on to Wayland, I was able to run it as follows:

    # Xwayland :2 &
    # export DISPLAY=:2
    # ./xantfarm

Anyone notice how the Wikipedia article doesn't say what Xsnow is or does, at all? Other than that it's a "software application".

It kind of does in the screenshot, with the figure text stating that it is a sample of the applications output.

Fat lot of good that would be for anyone who can't see the picture for any reason. It should be stated in the text of the article.

It animates snowfall on your screen behind and on top of your application windows. With santa and bird effects and a host of options to play with.

Maybe it's been update, but when I clicked through just now it says:

    Xsnow is a software application that creates the appearance of snow falling on the elements of the graphical user interface of a computer system.

The article links to xneko, which was a favorite of my friends and mine on the office's Irix and FreeBSD X desktops. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)

I used xneko a lot many years ago.

If you're using Ubuntu a variant called oneko [1] is still available in the repositories (not sure about the differences, it looks like the xneko that I remember)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-04lSS99z0

I was just thinking to myself that they dont make software like this anymore. But then I saw the latest release info. Wonderful.

>Stable release 3.3.2 / November 4, 2021; 36 days ago

It is "3.3.2 / November 4, 2021; 15 days ago" for me. Strange.

Probably a caching issue. I too was seeing "15 days ago", so I purged the cache (with &action=purge) and it now says "36 days ago".

I did not do anything, and now it shows "36 days ago". I have not visited the website before, FWIW.

&action=purge clears their cache, not mine. Instead of rending the page every visit, they cache them for obvious performance gains. But that can cause issues for things involving dates. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:File_cache

Oh, my bad! Thank you.

I had forgotten all about this.

There was a derivative called xoj where police cars chased a white bronco across your screen while a crowd gathered to watch.

Going beyond things like After Dark, there was a novelty commercial Windows program where you could attack your desktop with comical firearms and explosives. The name of it escapes me. It wasn't well-known, but it was cute for about 5 minutes.

I believe it might have been “Desktop Toys”

I totally remember. It was called Antistress.

I also remember a "cup holder" app which was advertised as a free cup holder. It had a button which when clicked opened the CD drive.

I miss those apps.

I remember that one. I have to say I miss the CDs loaded with what we'd call theming assets today. Sound themes, sound files for all those desktop apps that let you pick sound files for when your render finished or Lotus alarm went off or whatever.

Color themes for your desktop. Wallpapers, icons, some fonts and even some clip art both in EPS and BMP. Browse by category. Work assets, sure. But also family, holiday, history...

This could be done incredibly well today, but it isn't, that I know of. We've made big strides but I think there's still plenty of room for this important little stuff.

One place I worked at we had a nice little 'golf clap' when the build worked. Then of course you had to have the the 'missed the putt groan' when it failed. Nice feedback from 3 offices over and you did not have to sit and watch it. Fun times...

Yeah the feedback effect is great. I built a phased timer with espeak for feedback and after a while the default voice had me wishing for ASMR-style TTS of some sort...it was just too harsh.

> I also remember a "cup holder" app which was advertised as a free cup holder. It had a button which when clicked opened the CD drive.

I remember a Coca-Cola branded version of that app. I had way too much fun giving it to friends. :)

It was called Desktop Destroyer! I remember having a copy of it on a floppy disk.

It appears you can download it here: http://www.desktop-destroyer.net (I can't vouch for how legitimate the link is though)

Heh, comically enough it works out-of-the-box through WINE. Now all you *NIX users can enjoy a broken desktop (moreso than usual)

Speaking of destroying desktops: there was a nice screensaver for Windows : Gates does Windows 95.

Ah, yes. Back in the day, we'd run both xsnow and xearth on our SPARCstations, so you could see xsnow's Santa Claus sailing around the earth. :)

At a friend's new years eve party many moons ago we hacked up a copy of xsnow to drop pastel-colored confetti on the living room wall via the entertainment center's linux box which had a fancy projector.

Feeling old...

Apologies to my old classmates at the university, when during the computer lab sessions I would telnet(!) to their machines and launch at random times xneko and/or xsnow. Seeing their surprised and puzzled reactions from a few rows behind was one of the best silly laughs I've had in my life!

(If you happen to be one of them, track me down, I'm thanking you for your inadvertent participation and will invite you to a well-deserved nice meal.)

I would do that to my coworkers. Or, Xroach.

I’ve had xsnow start on login every December and January since 1996. However, it did not start last week, but I had not yet investigated why. This explains it; my startup was using the old command line options for version 1.42 of xsnow, not the new version. After some experimentation, my desktop is again covered in snow. All is as it should be.

I have `snow.sh` in my PATH. I have no idea where I originally got it from, but its the same as this gist https://gist.github.com/sontek/1505483

Unfortunately, with Wayland's growing popularity, such programs will not be able to run on the Linux desktop for much longer.

I mourn the loss of Compiz and Beryl more than quirks like this.

I miss my terminals which would explode into flames when closed.

But, such things are not impossible in wayland at all, it might even work via xWayland.

Those were very interesting times for the desktop. I remember slooowly backing off all the effects after changing Nvidia drivers and restarting X for the Nth time. :-) Eventually just stuck with nv or nouveau or whatever it was. I loved drawing with particles all over the desktop, but little tweaks here and there started to make the whole thing really complex.

Compiz was what got me to try out Linux in the first place - seeing wobbly windows and the desktop cube convinced me that this wasn't just a dry server OS but was actually something that could be fun to use.

Oh my, Compiz and Beryl does bring back memories!

There is a compiz plugin that seems to be updated

https://github.com/Vlaeh/compiz-plugin-snow

https://wayfire.org/ No experience, but this project appears to bring the compiz experience to Wayland.

Kwin (the KDE compositor) has most of those effects. I'm not sure about wayland support though.

FWIW, xsnow runs with wayland, but ignores the windows (even when i make then floating in Sway):

  $ xsnow
  Xsnow running in GTK version: 3.24.29
  Detected Wayland desktop
  xsnow 3.3.0

Probably works better with a non-tiling WM: https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/563400-XsnoW-anyo...

xsnow -h says:

> BUGS

> - Xsnow needs a complete rewrite: the code is a mess.

> …

> - Xsnow does run in Wayland, but will not snow on all windows.

I think it's more likely due to that native-Wayland windows are not visible to XWayland clients. XWayland clients, however, see all other XWayland clients' windows.

It ignored XWayland windows, too. Even the "welcome at xsnow" one. I don't have any other WM than Sway and i don't really want to install one just to try if xsnow works :D

Edit: looks like it doesn't ignore them after all! But the accumulated snow is hidden "behind" the top edge of the window, so it becomes visible only for a brief moment when i move the window downwards.

Delightful program, another oldie but a goodie is the 'melt' app which melts down all of the ui elements on your screen. I remember, back in the day, setting my display variable to that of my colleagues and surreptitously running melt.

Xsnow was always on for me around December. I found it even cooler then having my desktops on a transparent cube with a reflection with fish inside and wobbly windows that burn upon closing.

Demo page for an old javascript port of Xsnow:

https://klepp.biz/Software/jsSnow_de.html

They added a similar animation to the weather app in iOS 15. When it rains, it looks as if it’s falling on one of the UI elements: https://9to5mac.com/2021/09/24/ios-15-weather-app-hands-on/a...

The best programm. Small and does its job well.

I dunno. If it wasn't so seasonable, I'd say it's the best. Infestations are not seasonal, so my vote goes to xroach.

Xroach was difficult to get it right. For some reason the bugs will go instantly under windows and were flickering horribly.

I am using this on a web page: https://workshop.rs/2012/01/jquery-snow-falling-plugin/

I filed this as an issue in https://github.com/vivek9patel/vivek9patel.github.io/issues/...

Is there a version that works with compositors, e.g. compton or whatever Gnome does?

https://github.com/protractorninja/xsnow-comp-patch this works for me with picom!

Thanks, I'll try it.

It works for me with Compiz on MATE

Back in those days there also was a game which i can barely remember: There were two monkey any you need to throw bananas at each others over or through skyscrapers... Does anyone know what game that was?

The only skyscraper game I remember was the one where you're flying a plane that's getting lower and lower and you have to bomb the scyscrapers before you crash into them.

Probably not a game that would get made today...

QBasic Gorillas (gorilla.bas).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game)

haha nice!! Thanks, i will introduce that to my kids :) They will probably hate me...

Gorillas, on QBasic.

This game basically got me into programming, because you could easily edit the source code and then see how the game changed.

Same, though I didn't edit Gorillas itself. I played that as a kid, then later (c. 2000) in my Intro to Programming class in middle school, I cloned it in Pascal. I even randomly had it select a day or night background, with a randomly positioned sun or moon. Still think back on that fondly :)

I was also reminded of "Neko" so I installed it on my Ubuntu system. To be honest I kind of feel sorry for Neko on large, high resolution displays, it's a lot more work than it used to be on a 14" XGA screen.

The weirdest part about Xsnow was for some reason back on Solaris in 1996 other people at university could run it on the screen I was using.

The default for the X server was for a long time that everybody on the internet could connect. From today's perspective a bizar situation. Back then, when you logged in on an another computer, you only had to forward the DISPLAY envirnoment variable and applications on the remote host could connect to your local display. Handy, but very insecure.

I think that by 1996 this was no longer the case. However, people that were used to being able to forward displays would commonly use "xhost +" (likely in .profile or similar) to disable these access restrictions.

That also meant you could do things like:

DISPLAY=otherhost:0.0 xwd -root - | xwud -

to take a picture of someone else's screen and display it on your own. I may have the syntax a bit wrong - it's been a couple decades. ;)

In the early Web days, there were some sites that would let you display an application locally (not just on a local network, like a lot of institutional X applications, but across the internet) if you gave it the proper DISPLAY value (and did the right xhost command locally).

We're getting closer to getting full-circle on this, but much better security this time around.

Easy, you forgot to call xhost - after logging in.

When I was at the university bad things would happen to those that forgot that command on their login script, Xsnow would be quite harmless.

I love it - is there an xbell to go with it? :)

PS: I just got a jingle.mp3 and wrote a small script to randomly play it - goes very well with xsnow!

I opened this expecting a completely different xsnow I remember, which simulated video static as a white noise pattern, as if tuned to an empty analog TV channel. Pretty sure it used indexed color palette animation to give it a realistic feel without depending on high pixel update bandwidth.

Ech, nostalgia is real with this one. I just put christmas tree today. Thank you, h2odragon!

This is the first time I've ever felt that Wayland is missing something important

My Linux desktop in the 90s was always so cozy during winter with xsnow running over top of a beautifully rendered POVray scene (that took several days for my Cyrix 5x86 to render). I do miss those days.

Reminds me of [1], from back in the web-day.

[1] - https://www.producthunt.com/posts/snow-pro-by-eager

Anyone remember Underware? https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/underware

Does anyone know of a macOS version of this? The one linked to from Wikipedia is a pay app. I like my desktop silliness to be old school command-line fun.

Now I wonder how this (or the Windows version, to be more precise) would interact with eSheep...

Do you happen to know if there is a linux version?

The shareware version of Snow from Windows by Rick Jansen linked here doesn't work well with Windows 10, lots of image artifacting from (I assume) old Win32 display calls attempting to animate sprites across the desktop.

Looking for alternatives... found DesktopSnowOK which is freeware, small and portable, but doesn't seem to collect snow on top of the window frames :(

Oh my gosh! I miss that. Do you happen to remember the name of the program that allowed you to use a "hammer" against your screen which would result in the appearance of a broken screen?

I definitely had that as well at some point! Couldn't find it in my little collection of fun programs though. :( I also remember a Star Wars screensaver included with one of their games with Star Wars figures running around on the screen, shooting holes in your windows, etc...

Found it! It's called "Stress Relief": https://www.ghacks.net/2011/01/11/stress-relief-destroy-your...

That is it! Thank you! Amazing. :D I remember using this program pretending to have broken the screen. My parents did not believe me. :D

Wonderful.

But why does snow not stick on Electron windows? Are they ghosts!?

If I had to guess, Electron probably opens up a hidden main window and uses that to launch its different components (the chromium UI process and node backend). The snow most likely would only apply to the hidden main window.

Anyone know of safe versions of this for Windows?

doesn't work well with i3

Xeyes!

yay -S xsnow

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