I am again doing you a disservice by showing a static screenshot of zscroll:
The animation effect is what we’re really after with zscroll, as the letters shift from right to left and the data updates. None of that is really visible from that command or image. Use your imagination. 😉
zscroll is fairly straightforward to use, with simple flags for options like after-text or before-text, or for padding the display with special content. You can also adjust the speed of output, clip it at a particular length, or set it to use double-width characters.
And zscroll allows just about any text to appear, provided you can wrangle it to fit and display as you want. As an example, I yanked the mocp playback status in the image you see above; it’s nothing special, but shows zscroll’s relative flexibility.
I don’t see a way to reverse the scrolling effect, which means if you want a left-to-right motion for right-to-left languages, it might not happen. And of course, if you set zscroll to display in a window that’s wider than your target text, nothing moves at all. It would be nice if zscroll could wrap the object text to fill any space.
zscroll is a no-brainer for any kind of window manager that allows for status bar displays, or even tiling window managers that will run one row deep. A little elbow grease and — ta-da! a constant stock quote update in the upper corner of your screen. Or something like that. Again, use your imagination. 😉
zscroll is pure flair, but it’s good to add a little flair sometimes. It’s in AUR as zscroll-git, but not in Debian that I could find. 🙂
Inconsolation 