SKipper desktop tricks

SKipper for Linux, MacOS and Windows allows you to customize your SKipper experience with multiple arguments on the command line.

Changing location and size of the SKipper window

You can pass -location x,y,width,height to place SKipper at specified location in a window with a specific size (in pixels). This is handy when you want to automatically start SKipper on another screen, or start SKipper on just a part of the screen.

You can pass --no-exit to SKipper to hide any Close SKipper menu items. This is handy if you don't want to exit SKipper at all.

Switching off device when I close SKipper

You can pass --shutdown-on-exit argument when launching SKipper and when you click on Close SKipper it will execute shutdown command for each platform (Windows, Linux, MacOS).

Note

One note user must be able to execute shutdown command with sudo on Linux. This argument is working from version 1.0.23.

Override profile folder location

If you want to override the default location for storing settings, profile, and Signal K tokens, you can pass -profile "/new/path/to/store/profile".

Override cache folder location

SKipper uses temporary storage to store a few files. If you need to change that location, you can pass -cache "/new/path/to/store/cache".

Starting SKipper with Raspberry PI OS (full)

SKipper can be started automatically with LXDE. This was tested on the Buster version of Raspbian, based on Debian 12.

Open terminal and use the following command to enable auto-start of SKipper.

cp /usr/share/applications/skipper.desktop ~/.config/autostart/

This will copy a SKipper shortcut into the LXDE startup directory.

That's it! Now every time you start your Pi and login to your user, SKipper will start too!

Tip: In settings you can customize SKipper's window location and size, or use full screen mode.

Forcing Roboto as font default

You can run SKipper with Roboto font as default font, this is sometimes useful on Linux OS without font manager installed (for example BuiltRoot based OS). All you need is to pass --roboto argument when SKipper is starting.

Console Log

SKipper can log into console directly, this can be useful for debugging issues. Just pass --console-log to startup arguments to have console output.

Measuring performance

SKipper can show rendering metrics on the screen like FPS, render loop time, layout loop time on the screen. This is useful when you need to evaluate your system performance. All you need is to pass --debug-overlays argument to show these metrics on screen.

SKipper display support

Are you running OBP MAP4 or Raspberry PI official display? Great, SKipper does have support for controlling brightness automatically depending on theme!

Kind	Command	Note
OBP4MAP	-display obpmap4	Requires latest firmware
Raspberry PI display	-display raspberry	--

SKipper on Linux with DRM/Frame buffer

You can run SKipper on Linux as dashboard without any system shell. Just with DRM or Framebuffer. More information about this topic can be find on Linux DRM page.