This was originally from: http://home.istar.ca/~jenora/wmeyes.html [1.0]
Nowadays, it can be found at: http://www.bstern.org/wmeyes/ [1.1 and later]

This dockapp was originally by Bryan Feir.  Ben Stern hacked it so that it
would build under Solaris.


But why?

Bryan:
That's a question I've asked myself a few times, to be honest.  The idea just
hit me one day, helped along by a friend of mine who has a Mac that has eyes in
its menubar.  Between that, and my interest in doing a dock app for WindowMaker,
this was the result.  I expect any other dock apps I do to have somewhat more
functionality.

Ben:
I just wanted to have a nice docked set of eyes to burn up CPU power on my Sun
box.


How to build:

xmkmf
make
make install (or just 'cp wmeyes /usr/local/bin' if you prefer it there)


Comments:
Well, not much to say about this, to be honest.  It's not exactly a complicated
program; in fact, once it's running, there's nothing more you can do with it
except watch it.

As of 1.2, this is no longer true - you can click on the eyes to run a program.

The 'time' parameter on the command line affects both the update time of the
pupil moving around, and the time it takes for the eyelids to open or close.
These two haven't been seperated yet.  If anyone is interested in this, let me
know.

The standard method of starting it up under WindowMaker is 'wmeyes -w -s'.

To tell it to run a program when left-clicked, use: wmeyes -e 'xmag&'
Note that the & is required unless the program it runs detaches from the shell
or is extremely short-lived.

To tell wmeyes to open multiple displays at once, use the -d option as many
times as you have displays.  Example: wmeyes -d :0.0 -d :0.1

More on both of these at the bottom.


Credits [from Bryan's README]:

Thanks to whoever 'rws' was at the old X Consortium, the crazy fellow who wrote
the original xeyes that was my inspiration.

Thanks to 'shawkie' (shawkie@geocities.com) and of course Rob Malda
(malda@slashdot.org) for their numerous examples of how to write a WindowMaker
dock app.

Thanks to Masayuki Koba, the author of xneko, for the demonstration of how to do
a mouse-follower without descending into the chaos that is Xt intrinsics like
xeyes does.


Additions from Ben Stern:

I could not contact Bryan Feir - his web page listed above used to work, but the
email address for him in the source totally failed.  So I released this myself.
Presumably, if this makes him unhappy, he can email me and let me know.  My
email is in the source.

In 1.1, I mostly removed the dependency upon GNU getopt, since it is totally
nonportable.

In 1.2, I added changes based upon a patch I found at
http://www.shiratori.riec.tohoku.ac.jp/~jir/linux/products/wmeyes/index-e.html
which allows one to click upon the eyes and run a program.

Your command will be fed directly to the shell, so that you can use shell
metacharacters or what have you, although you will probably need to escape
them.  Note that wmeyes does not automatically background the program, so
you will probably want to background it yourself.

For example:
# run an xmag whenever the eyes are clicked on
wmeyes -w -e 'xmag &'
# show the number of lines with the word "foo" in them in your mail spool
wmeyes -e 'xmessage `grep -w foo $MAIL | wc -l` &'
# make wmeyes stop working until you have finished with a shell
wmeyes -e xterm
# my personal favorite: make the screen blank when the eyes are clicked on
wmeyes -e 'xset dpms force off'

I also added support for multiple displays at once.  Use -d, -display, or
--display as many times as you like.