A Solution to your Wayland Wallpaper Woes

Efficient animated wallpaper daemon for wayland, controlled at runtime

Dependencies

• a compositor that implements:
  • wlr-layer-shell (typically wlroots based compositors)
  • xdg-output
• lz4 (for compressing frames when animating)

Note that this means swww will not run on Gnome, because it does not implement the wlr-layer-shell protocol.

Build

Dependencies:

• Up to date stable rustc compiler and cargo (specifically, MSRV is 1.75.0)

To build, clone this repository and run:

cargo build --release

Then, put both binaries target/release/swww and target/release/swww-daemon in your path. Optionally, autocompletion scripts for bash, zsh, fish and elvish are offered in the completions directory.

Man pages:

In order to generate the man pages, you must have scdoc installed. Run

./doc/gen.sh

The man pages will be in doc/generated. To install them, you must move them to to the appropriate location in your system. You should be able to figure out where that is by running manpath.

Nix

NixOS users can directly use this repository to get the latest swww for their system.

Add in your flake.nix:

  inputs.swww.url = "github:LGFae/swww";

Pass inputs to your modules using specialArgs and Then in configuration.nix:

  environment.systemPackages = [
    inputs.swww.packages.${pkgs.system}.swww
  ];

Features

• Display animated gifs on your desktop
• Display any image in the formats:
  • jpeg
  • png
  • gif
  • pnm
  • tga
  • tiff
  • webp
  • bmp
  • farbfeld
• Clear the screen with an arbitrary rrggbb color
• Smooth transition effect when you switch images
• Do all of that without having to shutdown and reinitialize the daemon

Why

There are two main reasons that compelled me to make this: the first is that oguri is unmaintained and archived, despite there being serious problems with excess of memory use while displaying certain gifs (see this, for example). The best alternative I've found for oguri was mpvpaper, but if felt overkill for my purposes.

Comparing to oguri, swww uses less cpu power to animate once it has cached all the frames in the animation. It should also be significantly more memory efficient.

The second is that, to my knowledge, there is no wallpaper daemon for wayland that allows you to change the wallpaper at runtime. That is, in order to, for example, cycle through the images of a directory, you'd have to kill the daemon and restart it. Not only does it make simple shell scripts a pain to write, it makes switching from one image to the next to happen very abruptly.

Usage

Start by initializing the daemon:

swww-daemon

Then, in a different terminal, simply pass the image you want to display:

swww img <path/to/img>

# You can also specify outputs:
swww img -o <outputs> <path/to/img>

# Control how smoothly the transition will happen and/or it's frame rate
# For the step, smaller values = more smooth. Default = 20
# For the frame rate, default is 30.
swww img <path/to/img> --transition-step <1 to 255> --transition-fps <1 to 255>

# There are also many different transition effects:
swww img <path/to/img> --transition-type center

# Note you may also control the above by setting up the SWWW_TRANSITION_FPS,
# SWWW_TRANSITION_STEP, and SWWW_TRANSITION environment variables.

# To see all options, run
swww img --help

If you would like to know the valid values for <outputs>, you can query the daemon. This will also tell you what the current image being displayed is, as well as the dimensions detected for the outputs. If you need more detailed information, I would recommend using wlr-randr.

swww query

Finally, to stop the daemon, kill it:

swww kill

For a more complete description, run swww --help or swww <subcommand> --help.

Finally, to get a feel for what you can do with some shell scripting, check out the example_scripts folder. It can help you get started.

Transitions

Example wipe transition:

wipe transition with angle set to 30 deg

The left, right, top and bottom transitions all work similarly.

Example outer transition

The center transition is the opposite: it starts from the center and goes towards the edges.

There is also simple, which simply fades into the new image, any, which starts at a random point with either center of outer transitions, and random, which selects a transition effect at random.

Troubleshooting

The image looks tilted and in grayscale on my laptop

See #233. Current workaround is to use swww-daemon --format xrgb when starting the daemon.

High cpu usage during caching of a gif's frames

swww will use a non-insignificant amount of cpu power while caching the images. This will be specially noticeable if the images need to be resized before being displayed. So, if you have a very large gif, I would recommend resizing it before sending it to swww. That would make the caching phase much faster, and thus ultimately reduce power consumption. I can personally recommend gifsicle for this purpose.

Wallpaper disappears when reconnecting monitor

swww used to cache its images so that it could reload the current the last displayed image automatically. This lead to many problems and also proved to be very annoying to keep working with when we updated to sctk 0.17. So I decided to nuke it.

If you want a wallpaper to be set automatically when you reconnect to a monitor, you should use a combination of scripts and a program that lets you run commands when a new output is connected, like kanshi.

About new features

Broadly speaking, NEW FEATURES WILL NOT BE ADDED, UNLESS THEY ARE EGREGIOUSLY SIMPLE. I made swww with the specific usecase of making shell scripts in mind. So, for example, stuff like timed wallpapers, or a setup that loads a different image at different times of the day, and so on, should all be done by combining swww with other programs (see the example_scripts for some examples).

If you really want some new feature within swww itself, I would recommend forking the repository.

Alternatives

swww isn't really the simplest, mostest minimalest software you could find for managing wallpapers. If you are looking for something simpler, have a look at the awesome-wayland repository list of wallpaper programs . I can personally recommend:

• wbg - probably the simplest of them all. Strongly recommend if you just care about setting a single png as your permanent wallpaper on something like a laptop.
• swaybg - made by the wlroots gods themselves.
• mpvpaper - if you want to display videos as your wallpapers. This is also what I used for gifs before making swww.
• kitty - you can use the kitty terminal emulator with its panel kitten to have the output of an arbitrary TUI program such as htop or btop or similar as your desktop wallpaper.

Acknowledgments

A huge thanks to everyone involved in the smithay project. Making this program would not have been possible without it. In fact, the first versions of swww were quite literally copy pasted from the layer shell example in the client-toolkit .

A big thank-you also to HakierGrzonzo, for setting up the AUR package.

Wallpapers used in this README

Pixel Art, by Waneella - https://www.patreon.com/waneella

Gradient - https://www.behance.net/gallery/86128681/Free-Unicorn-Vector-Gradients

Silhouette of Skyway - https://unsplash.com/photos/silhouette-of-skyway-UUJzCuHUfYI