awesome-timed-wallpaper

For Léna.

A quick – and frankly quite dirty – hack to use gnome-style timed wallpapers with awesomewm.

awesome-timed-wallpaper is released under the LGPL v2.1 license, as it is based entirely around the data from the themes/Adwaita/backgrounds/adwaita-timed.xml file in gnome-themes-standard. That file was, according to the git history, created by Jakub Steiner (jimmac).

Quick Usage

You’ll need ImageMagick installed, as it is used to blend the images.

Add the following snippet to your rc.moon

wallpaper = require "adwaita-timed"

with gears.timer timeout: 3*60
    \connect_signal "timeout", (using nil) ->
        if bg_file = wallpaper!
            awful.screen.connect_for_each_screen (using nil) =>
                gears.wallpaper.centered bg_file, self, "solid:#000000"
    \emit_signal "timeout"
    \start!

Why?

Simple, I’ve badgered Léna about switching window managers for some time now. Mostly because many of the lunchtime complaints she makes about her current setup are already solved by a different window manager.

However, that of course means I’m on the hook when functionality she relied on doesn’t exist with that new choice. And apparently wallpaper that changes throughout the day is item one on the list.

This dirty hack just adds simplistic support for the Adwaita backgrounds she uses to awesomewm. It should serve mostly as an example of using timers and such, but it is functional.

[The solution I’d actually recommend is to use one of the many tiling layouts and never see your wallpaper again 😏]

How?

There are plenty of better and smarter ways to do this, but this is a fifteen minute hack(and ten of those were spent writing this very document).

Basically we have a timer which calls a function to generate the wallpaper as it should be at this moment. We generate the wallpapers using composite from ImageMagick, and cache them so that after a couple of days we’re no longer calling composite every three minutes.

The overhead for composite isn’t all the great, but if you can afford the ~50MB the full cache takes it makes sense.

We’re also somewhat careful to not actually change the wallpaper unless it has actually changed. It doesn’t make a great deal of difference, but also doesn’t take a great deal of effort to implement.

Configuration

If you’re using awesomewm, you should be used to customising lua or moonscript by now.

The specific things you’ll probably want to change are:

Variable	Type	Use
adwaita_path	string	Location of Adwaita theme
command_prefix	string	Prefix to apply to external commands
size	table	Resolution to generate images at

For example, if you’re running Debian you may need to use /usr/share/backgrounds/gnome as the path to the background images.

The future

If people would like to see a more generic framework for implementing this sort of behaviour then open an issue, and I’ll probably get to it. As things stand this does what I was told to implement, and no more.

Simple improvements could include:

• moving the data definition to a table for easy customisation from rc.moon
• using cairo or gdk-pixbuf via lgi to composite the images instead of shelling out to ImageMagick
• using cairo to create a surface directly as it supports heaps of fancy composition methods and awesomewm’s gears.wallpaper already accepts surfaces as input
• use awful.spawn’s asynchronous execution support to remove blocking calls to external processes

Contributors

I’d like to thank the following people who have contributed to awesome-timed-wallpaper.

Patches

• Nathan McGregor

Bug reports

• <your name here>

Ideas

• Léna Franck

If I’ve forgotten to include your name I wholeheartedly apologise. Just drop me a mail and I’ll update the list!

Bugs

If you find any problems, bugs or just have a question about this package either file an issue or drop me a mail.

If you’ve found a bug please attempt to include a minimal testcase so I can reproduce the problem, or even better a patch!