The help text for Flit (ver. 1.0.0):
INTRO
Flit is an applet 'tray', currently offering clock, master sound volume control, and battery monitor. It is written to be small and low-overhead, using the FLTK user interface library, so it is especially efficient on TinyCore Linux. The source code of Flit is released under the GNU license. See
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ for more details.
There is a menu of choices made available through right-clicking on Flit. The sound control applet has several additional keyboard shortcuts (see below). The Flit menu may optionally be opened automatically by a Ctrl key, as defined in the General Options section.
If you don't want to see all three applets, you can disable one or two of them in the right-click menu, but not all three!
'Hover' your mouse pointer over each applet to get more detailed information. The battery recharge time estimate is very approximate in this release. (I hope to improve the algorithm soon!)
If you want to start Flit automatically, invoke it in your /opt/bootlocal.sh startup script or make a custom .xsession script file, and use a & symbol to return control immediately to the script, like this:
/path/to/flit &
Note: The base configuration of TinyCore Linux (at least version 2.3) includes and
automatically starts Flit if the default window manager flwm is used.
CLOCK
The only option for the clock is 24-hour time format, or 12-hour format with AM or PM indication. Use the right-click menu to toggle between these modes. Hover the mouse pointer to see date and year in addition to time.
SOUND CONTROL
The current sound volume level is indicated by the number and size of the sound "rays" next to the speaker icon. To adjust the volume, place your mouse cursor over the speaker and use the mouse scroll wheel (or equivalent) to adjust the sound volume in 5% increments. You may also use the following keystrokes:
Louder: Ctrl+U, or Up arrow cursor key, or + key
Quieter: Ctrl+L, or Down arrow cursor key, or - key
Mute/Unmute: Ctrl+M, or Pause key
Future versions may also provide a pop-up slider control.
The sound control requires an OSS "mixer" device '/dev/mixer' to be present. There is a lot of variation in how sound devices can be controlled, but Flit will try to support some common methods. By default, Flit will try to find an appropriate mixer control to adjust the overall playback volume. You can override this behavior by specifying an exact OSS mixer control name in the .flit.conf file, in the "oss_control_name =" statement. If the name is "autosel", Flit will do the default auto-selection. But if you know that you get best results from a specific mixer control, such as "vol" or "pcm" or something else, put it name into the .flit.conf file, such as:
oss_control_name = pcm
If flit is not successful in finding a suitable control (which must be marked with the MASTER_VOLUME or PCM_VOLUME in OSS), you won't see the sound control applet in Flit, and you won't be able to "unhide" it. You may want to try the graphical mixer application ossxmix (note the X in the name) or command-line application ossmix and experiment with the controls made available for your hardware to see which ones can control the volume. If OSS + your hardware don't support an adjustable output volume, you may still be able to use a mute control with Flit.
LIMITATIONS: The OSS vmix software mixer control will only work if vmix is fully "attached" to your audio hardware (beyond the scope of this document). ALSA is not supported (at least not yet, anyway).
BATTERY MONITOR
In the battery icon, charge is colored green if the level is 40% or higher, yellow when 20% or higher, and red below 20%. If the estimated charge Is less than 13%, the outline of the battery icon will slowly flash red. When recharging power is available, an AC power plug icon is shown over the battery icon. If the battry is discharging, the remaining charge percentage number is shown above the battery icon.
The battery monitor requires information in the /proc/acpi system information, so you must boot Linux with the 'laptop' kernel option or load the appropriate ACPI kernel module. About three minutes after a switch between charging and discharging, Flit will begin showing estimates of the remaining time.
GENERAL OPTIONS
By default, Flit will automatically pop up the right-click menu if Flit has the keyboard focus and you press either Ctrl key, which you may do as part of a Ctrl+key combination. If you would prefer to not have Flit open the menu on Ctrl keypress, select the 'Toggle Ctrl key menu activation' menu option and then save the configuration.
You can choose one of appearance styles:
a) Normal: black on light gray, with a sunken tray effect
b) Inverse: light gray on black, also with a sunken tray effect
c) 'Transparent', which has a background color slightly lighter than the
X11 root window where Flit plans to appear and a contrasting
foreground color, with a flat effect, which matches
wbar nicely. If the planned location is occupied
by a window when Flit starts, its background color
will be based on that.
You may reposition Flit with your mouse (left-click + drag), or hand-edit the .flit.conf configuration file (see cautions below). The location can be defined to one of the four corners (se = SouthEast, i.e. the lower-right corner, and so on) or a x,y pair. See the configuration file for an example.
SAVING PREFERENCES
Use the 'Save configuration' command to make flit remember your preferences by writing the .flit.conf file in your home directory (as defined by the $HOME environment variable). You may edit this file with a text editor, but please preserve the spelling, capitalization, and spacing of content to prevent parsing problems. You can revert to default settings by deleting the .flit.conf file and restarting Flit.
EDIT: Attached help file here. The preferred place for this help file as of version 0.9.3 (and modified 0.9.2 in TC 2.3) is now /usr/share/doc/tc/flit_help.htm.
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