Windows users have a magical tool called Wallpaper Engine. It basically allows you to swap your wallpaper for any video file or webpage. I've used it. It kills perf if you're not on a moderately powerful machine, but it's still cool.
For the longest time, I'd had this wormhole thing I built out in MagicaVoxel as my wallpaper. When I was cleaning out my renders directory, I accidentally took the wallpaper with it. Eventually, I got tired of a solid black screen for a wallpaper, and decided I wanted something nicer. I spent a day trying to learn Blender's Geometry Nodes, before realizing they weren't capable of what I wanted, and then I built out the basic design I wanted and rendered an image sequence. When I looked for tools that could change the wallpaper, I found that none of them supported just rendering an image sequence, or a GIF, so I built my own wallpaper animation tool, wpren(WallPaper RENderer).
I'm not super familliar with XLib, so the program is written in shell. It could maybe be more efficient, but, again, don't know XLib. That being said it has a neglibible performance hit on my machine. If you're interested in optimizing it, feel free to email me(wpren@aleteoryx.me)! chmod +x it and have a time.
$ wpren <verb> [args...]
Wpren runs as a background daemon in an existing X11 session. The primary process must be manually backgrounded, but
from there all interaction is performed via signals. There are convenience verbs for sending these signals to a running
instance.
Verbs
+ run <wallpaper directory>
Start wpren with the passed wallpaper directory(see below). It will randomly select one of the wallpapers and begin
rendering it as the current wallpaper.
+ reroll
Send SIGUSR1 to an already running wpren instance, telling it to select a new random wallpaper.
+ pause
Send SIGSTOP to an already running wpren instance, temporarily halting the current animation.
+ resume
Send SIGCONT to an already running wpren instance, telling it to resume playback if paused.
+ kill
Send SIGKILL to an already running wpren instance, immediately closing it. Currently there is no cleanup method
implemented, so this will leave the wallpaper as the most recently set frame.
Wallpaper Directories
Wpren works by scanning through a so-called "wallpaper directory". This is any directory containing the following
structure:
wallpapers/
wallpaper/
config
img0001.png
img0002.png
img0003.png
.
.
.
.
.
.
wpren run will, when selecting a wallpaper, pick a random subdirectory of the passed wallpaper directory,
containing a config file and a sequence of .png files. The config is parsed in as shell, and is expected to set
the variable FRAMETIME to some numerical constant. This will be the number of seconds per-frame. Frames are
played in glob order, which may vary by locale. For most cases, however, this means any set of files which are
lexicographically ordered the same as their animation ordering will display fine. In other words, number your files
01.png, 02.png, 03.png, etc, instead of 1.png, 2.png, 3.png, etc, so that they are loaded in proper order. For more
info, check out the provided wallpaper directories.
Notes
This tool is built for single-user environments. If you have multiple X11 servers running, it will refuse to serve more
than one.
The included reroll_hook script will reroll the wallpaper. Its intended use is as a hook to run on system
suspend. I personally like having a new wallpaper every once in a while, but having it change while I'm looking at it is
distracting. Being that my main machine is a laptop, I end up getting a lot of variety out of it. Under systemd, it can
be placed at /usr/lib/systemd/system-sleep/ to run on suspend. If you do not have access to root, I believe
there is a way to accomplish this via D-Bus, and other init systems may have their own ways to hook into system suspend.
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