box11 is the next generation in box-drawing technology. It provides a simple way to display text anywhere on the screen.

Run box11 --help for usage information.

box11 displays standard input. For example:

while true; do 
    date
    sleep 1
done | box11 -u hv

This will write the date in a grey box in the upper-left corner of the screen, updating it once per second. The -u hv argument will cause the box to automatically resize to fit the horizontal and vertical bounds of the text.

xcb, xcb-xrm, cairo, and pango are required to build box11. Consult your distribution's repositories for package names.

To build, run:

• mkdir build
• make

This will place the box11 executable in the build directory.

To install it system-wide, simply make install. Running that command with the INSTALL_PATH environment variable set will override the directory to which the box11 executable is installed.

This project could be expanded in a number of ways:

• Manpage
• Image rendering support
• User input (probably better suited to another project like dmenu)