Aesthetic User Manual
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A beginner’s guide to Aesthetic screensavers.
Max Wash
January 15, 2018
Introduction
Forget Windows builtin screensavers, aesthetic.exe is all you need to save your
screen and dazzle anyone in a 3 mile radius. Make your friends jealous and your
local IT technician hate you with aesthetic.exe
Not only is aesthetic.exe a best-in-class screensaver engine, it is also extremely
user-friendly. With the graphical launcher aesthetic-gui.exe anyone can create
amazing screensavers regardless of their technical experience.
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Configuration
Aesthetic uses a flags system to allow you to customise your screensaving expe-
rience. These flags, and their corresponding parameters, can either be entered in
the program itself, or given to the program as command-line parameters.
Flags
•t:Text
The ’t’ flag allows you to change the text that is drawn on the
squares. By default, ”No text” is printed. This flag cannot be
used with the ’f’ flag.
•f:File
The ’f’ flag allows you to specify a text file to be used as text
input. One box will be created for each line in the file. An error
message will be displayed if the file couldn’t be loaded, or if it is
empty. This flag cannout be used with the ’t’ flag.
•c:Classic mode
Emulates the rendering style of the classic rococo screensaver, com-
plete with all the broken colours, bugs, and memory leaks. This
flag overrides the ’d’, ’v’, ‘q’ and ‘n’ flags.
•r:Rails mode
Emulates the rendering style of the classic rococo screensaver after
it has been running for too long and starts leaving coloured streaks
all over the screen due to a memory leak. This flag must be used
with the ‘c’ flag.
•b:Double buffering
Enables double buffering, which is used to prevent flickering text
in modern mode. This flag has no effect in classic mode, and may
result in a slower screensaver.
•q:Font
Allows you to set the font and size of the rendered text. In
command-line mode, the font family and size must be specified
one after the other.
•n:Number of boxes
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The ’n’ flag allows you to specify how many boxes are drawn to
the screen. Each box will have a random starting position and
velocity, unless you have overridden the velocity with the ’s’ or ’v’
flags.
•d:Box Dimensions
The ’d’ flag allows you to set the size of the boxes. By default
the boxes will conform to the size of the text inside them, with
padding. The dimensions need to be specified in the format ”XxY”
(i.e. the horizontal and vertical dimensions, separated by an ’x’).
•s:Speed
The ’s’ flag allows you to set the speed of all the boxes. The X
and Y velocity components will be set to the value you provide
(i.e. the boxes will move in a perfectly diagonal line).
•v:Velocity
The ’v’ flag is similar to the ’s’ flag, except it allows you to set the
individual X and Y velocity components, effectively allowing you
to change the direction of the boxes. The velocity needs to be spec-
ified in the format ”XxY” (i.e. the X and Y velocity components,
separated by an ’x’).
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User Input
Aesthetic can operate in two modes, giving you two ways to configure it.
Interactive Mode In this mode, aesthetic will open a command prompt
and ask you to enter a set of flags. Then, it will ask you to enter any
parameters that those flags need (i.e. if you entered the fflag, aesthetic will
ask you to enter the name of a text file). Once all the needed parameters
have been entered, the command prompt will close and the screensaver will
start.
Command-line mode In this mode, you pass the set of flags that you
want to use as the first argument to aesthetic.exe in a command prompt.
Then, you must enter the parameters that your chosen set of flags require,
in the order that the flags appear in the list. For example, if your first
parameter is ds, your next two parameters should be 300x30 5
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