hyprpaper

Hyprpaper is a blazing fast wallpaper utility for Hyprland with the ability to dynamically change wallpapers through sockets. It will work on all wlroots-based compositors, though.

Features

• Per-output wallpapers
• fill or contain modes
• fractional scaling support
• IPC for blazing fast wallpaper switches
• preloading targets into memory

Installation

AUR: yay -S hyprpaper-git

Manual:

git clone https://github.com/hyprwm/hyprpaper
cd hyprpaper
make all

the output binary will be in ./build/, copy it to your PATH, e.g. /usr/bin

Usage

Hyprpaper is controlled by the config, like this:

~/.config/hypr/hyprpaper.conf

preload = /path/to/image.png

# .. more preloads

wallpaper = monitor,/path/to/image.png

# .. more monitors

Preload will tell Hyprland to load a particular image (supported formats: png, jpg, jpeg). Wallpaper will apply the wallpaper to the selected output (monitor is the monitor's name, easily can be retrieved with hyprctl monitors. You can leave it empty for a wildcard (aka fallback))

You may add contain: before the file path in wallpaper= to set the mode to contain instead of cover:

wallpaper = monitor,contain:/path/to/image.jpg

A Wallpaper cannot be applied without preloading. The config is not reloaded dynamically.

Important note to the inner workings

Preload does exactly what it says. It loads the entire wallpaper into memory. This can result in around 8 - 20MB of mem usage. It is not recommended to preload every wallpaper you have, as it will be a) taking a couple seconds at the beginning to load and b) take 100s of MBs of disk and RAM usage.

Preload is meant only for situations in which you want a wallpaper to switch INSTANTLY when you issue a wallpaper keyword (e.g. wallpaper per workspace)

In any and all cases when you don't mind waiting 300ms for the wallpaper to change, consider making a script that:

• preloads the new wallpaper
• sets the new wallpaper
• unloads the old wallpaper (to free memory)

IPC

You can use hyprctl hyprpaper (if on Hyprland) to issue a keyword, for example

hyprctl hyprpaper wallpaper DP-1,~/Pictures/myepicpng.png

Battery life

Since the IPC has to tick every now and then, and poll in the background, battery life might be a tiny bit worse with IPC on. If you want to fully disable it, use

ipc = off

in the config.

Unloading

If you use a lot of wallpapers, consider unloading those that you no longer need. This will mean you need to load them again if you wish to use them for a second time, but will free the memory used by the preloaded bitmap. (Usually 8 - 20MB, depending on the resolution)

You can issue a hyprctl hyprpaper unload [PATH] to do that.

You can also issue a hyprctl hyprpaper unload all to unload all inactive wallpapers.

For other compositors, the socket works like socket1 of Hyprland, and is located in /tmp/hypr/.hyprpaper.sock (this path only when Hyprland is not running!)