Random wallpaper with swaybg

Setting a wallpaper in Sway, with swaybg, is easy. Unfortunately there is no way of setting a random wallpaper automatically out of the box. Here is a little helper script to do that.

The script is based on a post from Silvain Durand1 with some slight modifications. I just linked the script my sway config instead of setting a background there.

Sway config: ~/.config/sway/config

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# ...
exec ~/scripts/swaybg/rand_wallpaper.sh

The script spawns a new swaybg instance, changes the wallpaper, and kills the old instance. With this approach there is no flickering of the background when changing.

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#!/usr/bin/env sh

# Wallpaper directory
WP_FOLDER=~/wallpaper

# Time in seconds to change wallpaper
WAIT_TIME=599

while true; do
 PID=$(pidof swaybg)
 FILE=$(find "$WP_FOLDER" -type f -name '*.png' -o -name '*.jpg' | shuf -n1)
 swaybg -i "$FILE" -m fill &
 sleep 1
 kill "$PID"
 sleep "$WAIT_TIME"
done

An always up-to-date version can be found in my dotfiles.

1. Original script from Silvain Durand: https://sylvaindurand.org/dynamic-wallpapers-with-sway/ ↩︎