# paperview

**Repository Path**: mirrors_trending/paperview

## Basic Information

- **Project Name**: paperview
- **Description**: A high performance X11 animated wallpaper setter
- **Primary Language**: Unknown
- **License**: MIT
- **Default Branch**: master
- **Homepage**: None
- **GVP Project**: No

## Statistics

- **Stars**: 0
- **Forks**: 0
- **Created**: 2020-08-05
- **Last Updated**: 2026-05-23

## Categories & Tags

**Categories**: Uncategorized

**Tags**: None

## README

# PAPERVIEW

Paperview is a high performance animated desktop background setter for Linux and X11.

![](screenshot.png)

Video of the above screenshot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZTiA885bWM

## Build

    make # NOTE: SDL2 is required

## Single Monitor Use

    ./paperview FOLDER SPEED

A lower SPEED number will result in a faster frame rate. Only BMP files are supported.

## Multi Monitor Use

Paperview supports any number of monitors with its dynamic parameter list:

    ./paperview FOLDER SPEED X Y W H FOLDER SPEED X Y W H # ... And so on

The values X, Y, W (width), H (height) are integers and represent a rectangle with pixel
dimensions specifying where the wallpaper animation will be placed.
For instance, with a 1366x768 monitor on the left and a 1920x1080 monitor on the right,
the following command will animate the left monitor with a cat animation,
and the right, a river animation:

    ./paperview \
        ~/scenes/cat   5    0   0 1366  768 \
        ~/scenes/river 5 1366   0 1928 1080

## Running Background Daemon

Append an (&) to a paperview command to have it run as a background process. Eg:

    ./paperview FOLDER SPEED &

To stop this backgroud process, use `killall`:

    killall paperview

## Creating Custom Scenes

Creating a custom BMP scene folder from a GIF requires imagemagick.
For example, to create a castle scene folder from a castle.gif:

    mkdir castle
    mv castle.gif castle
    cd castle
    convert -coalesce castle.gif out.bmp
    rm castle.gif

## Random Animated Wallpapers at Startup

Assuming a scenes folder containing a number of scene folders is present in the home folder,
run the following snippet as a background process within .xinitrc before running `startx`,
or simply execute it after X11 is running:

    while true
    do
        scene=$(ls -d ~/scenes/*/ | shuf -n 1)
        timeout 600 paperview $scene 5 # See Multi-Monitor Use above for multiple monitor support
    done

## Performance

Running on a Thinkpad X230 from 2012 at 1920x1080 and 60fps with an integrated Intel GPU:

    intel_gpu_time ./paperview castle 5

    user: 1.904135s, sys: 0.357277s, elapsed: 100.458648s, CPU: 2.3%, GPU: 11.7%

## Known Issues

Picom, Compton (and possibly other compositors) seem to already write to the base root X11 window
which may overwrite the render done by paperview.

## Alternatives

Alternatively, if SDL2 is a problem, or if you are on Windows, two workarounds are currently available:

### Pure X11 (without SDL2)

https://gist.github.com/AlecsFerra/ef1cc008990319f3b676eb2d8aa89903

### Windows 10

https://github.com/TrAyZeN/sdl-wallpaper