.. RST source for xdeadzone(1) man page. Convert with:
..   rst2man.py xdeadzone.rst > xdeadzone.1

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=========
xdeadzone
=========

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
keep the mouse pointer out of the dead zone, on mismatched multihead displays.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

:Manual section: 1
:Manual group: Urchlay's Misc Stuff
:Date: |date|
:Version: |version|

SYNOPSIS
========

xdeadzone [**-nw** | **-ne** | **-sw** | **-se** | **-abs** *x-position* *y-position*] *width* *height*

xdeadzone **--help** | **--version**

DESCRIPTION
===========

**xdeadzone**'s job is to create a window of a specified size and
position, and prevent the mouse pointer from entering it.

The intended use for it is to keep the mouse out of the "dead zone"
of a multi-head X display where the monitors don't all have the same
resolution. When used for this purpose, there will be no visible
**xdeadzone** window (if there is, you've got the size and/or position
wrong).

It could also be useful for covering annoying parts of the screen,
e.g. advertisements in ad-driven software like the Opera browser, or
Adobe Reader. Use **-abs** (absolute positioning) mode for this.

When **xdeadzone** is running in a visible part of the screen, it'll
appear as a solid white rectangle with no title bar or window frame;
it'll stay on top of other windows; and it will appear on every
virtual desktop.

**xdeadzone** has been tested with various window managers and desktop
environments, and works properly with at least: KDE (Plasma 5), XFCE
4, Fmwv2, WindowMaker, BlackBox, and FluxBox.

OPTIONS
=======

--help
  Print built-in help message and exit.

--version
  Print the application name and version number, and exit.

**-nw**
  Place window at northwest (top left) corner of display.

**-ne**
  Place window at northeast (top right) corner of display.

**-sw**
  Place window at southwest (bottom left) corner of display.

**-se**
  Place window at southeast (bottom right) corner of display.

**-abs** *x-position* *y-position*
  Place window at the given coordinates. Negative numbers will be
  treated as offsets from the right/bottom of the display.

**width**
  Width of the dead zone. Required; must be a positive integer.

**height**
  Height of the dead zone. Required; must be a positive integer.

ENVIRONMENT
===========

**DISPLAY**
  As usual for X applications: the X server to connect to.

EXIT STATUS
===========

With **--help** or **--version**, exit status is 0 (success).

If there's an error in the arguments, exit status is non-zero (failure).

In normal operation, **xdeadzone** never exits.

EXAMPLES
========

You have a 1920x1080 LCD monitor on the left, and a 1280x1024
one on the right. This gives you a nice 3200x1080 X display... but the
mouse can "vanish", because X pretends the right-hand monitor has
1080 vertical pixels. So there's a 1280x56 horizontal strip "below" the
bottom of the right-hand monitor that doesn't get displayed. If the
mouse moves into this area, the pointer disappears, and it's not
obvious what happened to it.

To avoid losing the pointer, you can run this::

  xdeadzone -se 1280 56 &

...from your ~/.xinitrc (or whatever you use to run commands at X startup).

If you instead have the same two monitors in a vertical arrangement,
with the 1280x1024 one on top, you'll have a 640x1024 vertical strip
of 'dead zone' beyond the right edge of the top monitor. To avoid
losing the mouse there::

  xdeadzone -ne 640 1024 &

If the dead zone were on the left of the top monitor, you'd use **-nw** instead
of **-ne**.

BUGS
====

There isn't much error-checking for the numeric arguments. Anything
non-numeric will be read as zero. If you include a decimal point,
that should be an error, but instead it's silently ignored (the value
is truncated).

Maybe it should background (daemonize) itself. However, it works
fine with & to background it, and this is pretty common practice for
starting X software from ~/.xinitrc.

COPYRIGHT
=========

WTFPL. Do WTF you want to with this.

See http://www.wtfpl.net/txt/copying/ for details.

AUTHORS
=======

**xdeadzone** was written by B. Watson (urchlay@slackware.uk).

SEE ALSO
========

**xrandr**\(1)