github.com/termhn/bgcarousel

bgcarousel

bgcarousel is intended to be an easy-to-use, drop-in replacement for feh to be used for background switching. It will search for images in a directory (by default ~/Pictures/Wallpapers/) and automatically swap your background after a set amount of time, defaulting to 10 seconds.

How to use

Install from source

First, install Go and configure your environment. For example:

$ sudo dnf install go

In bashrc or equivalent config file for other shells:

export GOPATH=$HOME/go
export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin

It also depends on feh to do the actual work behind the scenes, so install that as well.

$ sudo dnf install feh

With go installed, do

$ go get -u github.com/termhn/bgcarousel

And finally in your i3 config, add:

exec_always --no-startup-id killall bgcarousel; bgcarousel

Options

Use bgcarousel -h to print the help information, also for reference here:

$ bgcarousel -h
NAME:
   bgcarousel - automatically rotate background image on a timer
   
VERSION:
   1.0.0
   
AUTHOR:
   Gray Olson <[e-mail]>
   
USAGE:
   bgcarousel [global options]
   
GLOBAL OPTIONS:
   -t value, --timeout value    Specify timeout between image rotation in seconds (default: 10)
   -d value, --directory value  Specify directory to search for images (default: "/home/amelie/Pictures/Wallpapers")
   --random                     selects a random image from the source directory instead of being cyclic
   --help, -h                   show help
   --version, -v                print the version

For example, to make it choose a random image in ~/Pictures/Wallpapers/selects/ every 30 seconds, you could do

bgcarousel --random -t 30 -d ~/Pictures/Wallpapers/selects

Todo

Handle errors that occur when removing images from source directory while running and support adding new images to source directory while running

Possible future features

I want to work on a way to have a small fade transition between each image, but I'm not sure it will be possible without a rewrite using a different underlying program to set the background.