kde-wallpaper-cli

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Set the wallpaper for KDE from the command-line.

Note: New versions of KDE have a command-line tool plasma-apply-wallpaper to do this

Attribution

The approach used here was documented on stackoverflow and this blogpost by Yaltirakli, which uses the same motivation.

Motivation

It's so silly. It should be easy to set the wallpaper from the command-line. But in KDE there is no easy way to do this, instead you have to send a dbus message which runs a script which configures the desktop. I'm not going to remember this, and so I'd need to put this in a script. Also, I like to have as little of "my own" configuration as possible and instead push this into open source command-line tools so moving machines is useful. This creates this script, but makes it easy to install this on a new machine and shares this with the world.

The "accepted" way of doing this seems to be send a script to KDE's plasmashell to update the wallpaper for each desktop.

Alternatives and prior work

I tried superpaper but this did not work with pipx without manual tweaks.

Tools like feh can set wallpaper for other window managers.

Related tools

You might like to try my program mapillary-nearby which will find streetview style images around a given area.

About me

I am @readwithai. I create tools for reading, research and agency sometimes using the markdown editor Obsidian.

I also create a stream of tools that are related to carrying out my work.

I write about lots of things - including tools like this - on X. My blog is more about reading and research and agency.