BlurWal 1.1.1

Smoothly blurs the wallpaper when windows are opened.

Smoothly blurs the wallpaper when windows are opened.

BlurWal

BlurWal smoothly blurs the wallpaper when a given number of windows is opened on the focused workspace. This is done by first generating transition frames from the current wallpaper, with each of them being blurred with an increasing level. Upon opening enough windows, each frame will be set as the wallpaper in quick succession, resulting in a transition. When the number of open windows goes below the threshold again, the transition will run in reverse and consequently unblur the wallpaper.

Table of Contents

• Installation
  • Dependencies
  • Supported Backends
  • Stable Release
  • Development Version
• Usage
• Multi-monitor Setups
• Contributors
• License

Installation

Dependencies

• Python 3.6+
• ImageMagick (for generating transition frames)
• A compatible backend, depending on your environment

Supported Backends

Name in CLI	Command used	Environment	Availability
feh	feh	Most WMs (i3, awesome, bspwm, Openbox, etc.)	Separate package
xfce	xfconf-query	Xfce (uses xfconf to store wallpaper configuration)	Part of Xfce

Stable Release

pip install --user blurwal

Also available in the Arch User Repository as blurwal

Installing from the AUR is preferred, as BlurWal will be updated together with the rest of your system.

Development Version

git clone https://gitlab.com/BVollmerhaus/blurwal
cd blurwal
pip install --user .

The latest changes on master, which may not be as stable.

Usage

Simply run blurwal and it will regenerate its transition frames and blur on the appropriate window events.

CLI

This list includes only the interesting options – run blurwal -h for a complete list and further information.

Option	Description
-m, --min	The minimum number of windows to blur the wallpaper (default: 2)
-s, --steps	The number of steps in a blur transition (default: 10, minimum: 2)
-b, --blur	The blur strength (sigma) to use when fully blurred (default: 10)
-i, --ignore	A space-separated list of window classes to exclude
--backend	The backend to use (one of the compatible backends)

Multi-monitor Setups

Multi-monitor configurations are only partially supported. Depending on the backend, BlurWal will use the wallpaper of your primary monitor (and first workspace) and apply it to all monitors, only taking the focused workspace and the number of windows on it into account. This also means that using different wallpapers per individual monitor is not possible, as all will be overwritten with the primary one.

Changing this behavior is planned but will require some major changes.

Contributors

Maintainer

• Benedikt Vollmerhaus

Others

• Matthias Bräuer (Testing and Code Reviews)

License

BlurWal is licensed under the MIT license. See LICENSE for more information.