Waypaper

GUI wallpaper setter for Wayland, Xorg, and macOS. It works as a frontend for popular wallpaper backends like swaybg, swww, awww, wallutils, hyprpaper, mpvpaper, gslapper, xwallpaper, feh, linux-wallpaperengine, and macos. See demo and documentation.

Features

• Vim keys
• Supports GIF animations (with awww or mpvpaper or gslapper)
• Supports videos (with mpvpaper or gslapper)
• Supports multiple monitors (with awww or swaybg or hyprpaper or mpvpaper)
• Works on Wayland (with awww or swww or swaybg or hyprpaper or wallutils or mpvpaper or gslapper)
• Works on Xorg (with feh, xwallpaper or wallutils)
• Works on macOS (with macos)
• Supports linux-wallpaperengine so you can use your animated wallpapers from Steam's Wallpaper Engine
• Restores wallpaper after restart (waypaper --restore)
• Fast and minimal (315 kB)

Installation

Install at least one of the backends and Waypaper, which works as a frontend.

1. Install a backend

Install a preferred backend from your package manager: swww (archived) or awww or swaybg or hyprpaper on Wayland or xwallpaper or feh on Xorg or mpvpaper or gslapper or wallutils on both. Install linux-wallpaperengine if you want to use Steam's Wallpaper Engine animated wallpapers. On macOS, use the built-in macos backend.

2. Install Waypaper

Install waypaper, which is available in different repositories:

On all distributions

pipx install waypaper

If pipx is not found, you first need to install pipx from your package manager, it's sometimes called python-pipx.

On Arch-based distributions

yay -S waypaper

The waypaper package and unstable developer package waypaper-git are available in AUR, thanks to metak. Please upvote to support the project.

On NixOS

The waypaper package is available thanks to Basil Keeler.

On OpenSUSE

Users of OpenSUSE reported issue with installation via pipx install waypaper. This can be resolved by installing the python313-pycairo-devel and python313-gobject-devel packages first.

On Fedora

Waypaper is available in an external repository owned by Solopasha. You can add this repository as sudo dnf copr enable lionheartp/Hyprland and install as sudo dnf install waypaper.

On macOS

First install GTK3 and PyGObject via Homebrew, then install Waypaper:

brew install gtk+3 pygobject3
pipx install waypaper

If pipx is not installed: brew install pipx && pipx ensurepath.

To make Waypaper accessible from Spotlight and Launchpad, copy the provided app bundle to your Applications folder:

cp -r data/macos/Waypaper.app ~/Applications/

Dependencies

• awww or swww or swaybg or xwallpaper or feh or wallutils or hyprpaper or mpvpaper or gslapper or linux-wallpaperengine or macos
• gobject python library (it might be called python-gobject or python3-gi or python3-gobject in your package manager.)
• python-imageio
• python-imageio-ffmpeg
• python-screeninfo
• python-platformdirs

Usage

waypaper command will run GUI application.

waypaperd runs a simple slideshow daemon that periodically triggers waypaper --random. If no interval argument is passed, it reads waypaperd_cycle_length from Waypaper's configuration and falls back to 30 minutes.

To restore your wallpaper after restart, add waypaper --restore to your WM startup config.

Slideshow daemon service

Packaged installations also ship a waypaperd.service user unit. You can enable it with:

systemctl --user daemon-reload && systemctl --user enable --now waypaperd.service

The unit starts waypaperd without systemd-specific interval overrides, so the daemon follows Waypaper's normal configuration path.

Documentation

• CLI options
• Configuration
• Keybindings
• Troubleshooting
• Automatically changing wallpaper
• Set wallpaper after restart

Contribution

Feel free to propose PR and suggest the improvements. I'll appreciate help with packaging for various distributions. If you wish to contribute with translation into your language, please see the translations.py file. Here are a few guiding principles for contribution:

• Please do not apply automatic code formatting tools on the entire code base.
• Please propose features separately, don't combine unrelated changes into one PR.
• For big changes, please open an issue first to discuss, otherwise PR might be declined.
• If the changes involve hundreds of lines of code, probably something is wrong. Most things can be done with small adjustments.

Support

I am not a professional developer and work on open-source projects in my free time. If you'd like to support the development, consider donations via:

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