I've been looking at themes, and I've seen screenshots which show console output being displayed on the X desktop, apparently not in a window, but right on the background. How does one do this? Thanks!

root-tail :) http://root-tail.plan9.de

Cheers,
Tink

Depending on the WM - you can hide the decorations (such as in Openbox). In this case, one could use a transperant aterm with all decorations turned off for the same affect.

Thanks for pointing that out Tinkster, for now I've been using aterm, tail -F and 'colorize'. I wonder if there is any difference from this to that...

Well, the root-tail thing can't be shifted afterwards,
it really outputs to your root window. I assume that
you can get the decorations on your aterm back
somehow?

I'd also assume that root-tail has a slightly lower
memory-footprint.

Cheers,
Tink

Yeah, but I also have keybinds to move around and resize windows....
; )

As for colorize, I've been using the perl script, but have actually found someone who has rewrote in C. Wonder how big of a performance change this would do. I've also tried root-tail and the only thing is that I don't have too much activity in my logs so I can either (a) post my IP on some IRC #l33t channel or (b) figure out some ways to test these low footprint programs (vs. the likes of 'top').

Any ideas?

btw, how does the syntax in root-tail work in terms of color.
/path/to/file,color,'desc' Is the description something like the syslog definitions - ie. info, crit, etc.? (The colorize uses word search pattern - so in this case I guess it's more useful in detailing the output, eg. green - src IP, port; red - dest IP, port, and so forth)