bwp - budlabs wallpaper selector

bwp was created because I wanted a way to navigate wallpaper history. I also thought that it would be cool to be able to blur the current wallpaper as well as lock the screen with the current wallpaper, so that's in here too.

The development process was recorded and published to youtube as: How to change wallpapers on the budlabs youtube channel.

When a file is added to the bwp library (BWP_DIR/walls), it will get resized according to the environment variable BWP_GEOMETRY (defaults to the resolution of the currently active monitor). And a blurred version of the image will get created. This makes for very fast blur toggling and lock screen activation.

bwp has a commandline interface, and can be used accordingly. If no argument is passed to bwp it will set the wallpaper to whatever file BWP_DIR/currentwall is linked to. So adding the following line to your startup script is nice:

bwp

The wiki has some examples:

• i3
• polybar
• thunar
• i3lock

I should also mention that bwp started out as "mod" of betterlockscreen by pavanjadhaw

installation

If you use Arch Linux you can get bwp from AUR. Use make(1) to do a systemwide installation of both the script and the manpage.

(configure the installation destination in the Makefile, if needed)

$ git clone https://github.com/budlabs/bwp.git
$ cd bwp
$ make
# make install
$ bwp -v
bwp - version: 2019.08.24.10
updated: 2019-08-24 by budRich

usage

bwp [OPTIONS] [WALLPAPER]
-a, --add                   | add FILE or files in DIRECTORY to the library.
-b, --blur                  | toggle/set blur.
-d, --delete                | delete WALLPAPER from library and history.
-f, --force                 | change behavior of --delete and --add options
-h, --help                  | print help and exit  
-I, --image-options OPTIONS | options passed to `convert` before locking the screen
-l, --lock                  | locks the computer with `i3lock(1)`.
-L, --lock-options  OPTIONS | Additional command line options passed to `i3lock`.
-n, --next                  | set next wallpaper according to BWP_DIR/history
-p, --prev                  | set previous wallpaper according to BWP_DIR/history
-r, --random                | get a random wallpaper from BWP_DIR/walls
-x, --rename        NEWNAME | rename WALLPAPER to NEWNAME
-V, --verbose               | louder output
-v, --version               | print version info and exit  
-w, --wallpaper             | use current wallpaper when --lock is used

The argument WALLPAPER is available for all actions except --add and can be either the name of a file in BWP_DIR/walls or the path to a file (if the file doesn't exist in the library, it will get added before the action is applied). If the WALLPAPER argument is omitted and no navigate action (--next,--pre,--random) is specified the action will get applied to the currentwall (the file that BWP_DIR/currentwall links to.*)

*except for the --lock action that will use BWP_DIR/currentlock.

dependencies

ImageMagick is used to resize and blur wallpapers and prepare the lockscreen background.

i3lock is used to lock the computer. I personally use the fork i3lock-color, and that works as well, these are off course only needed if you intend to lock the screen.

feh is the default program to set the wallpaper, but it can be changed by setting the environment variable BWP_COMMAND.

xrandr is used to fetch the screen dimensions.

if pngquant is installed it will be used to convert blurred images to png8 to save space.

if parallel is installed it will be used when adding multiple files (when the last argument to bwp is a path to a directory). It should be faster then xargs, (which is used if parallel is not installed), but utilize more of the CPU.