Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Users Search
Help Dashboard Sign In Sign Up
Q&A Meta
Q&A
Posts Tags Edits
Ask Question

Comments on Reliably set a wallpaper in i3

Post

Reliably set a wallpaper in i3

+1
−0

Currently I set my wallpaper by having a call to feh in my i3 config. This does set the wallpaper, but it seems buggy. Whenever my monitor configuration changes, the wallpaper gets moved partially off screen, distorted (too big or small), and empty spaces appear in the corner of the screen. When I restart i3 (using the i3 restart key combination) the wallpaper gets fixed (until next monitor change), probably because it relaunches feh.

Clearly this is something that can work because other DEs like KDE don't have this issue of wallpaper breaking when you change the screen configuration.

How can I make my set up work reliably, similar to these DEs? I don't have to use feh, it was just the first thing I tried.

arch-linux i3wm xorg
posted 4 months ago
user card
matthewsnyder‭
1806 reputation 122 75 285 109
History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

1 comment thread

Sounds lile a bug (2 comments)
Sounds lile a bug
Andreas witnessed the end of the world today‭ wrote 4 months ago
copy link

I’m no expert at this utility, but it sounds like a bug if the purpose is that the user can permanently set a background image. If the purpose however, is for applications to invoke it to set the background, it might expect them to observe for screen changes, and update accordingly, by reinvoking it each time something changes, as that invalidates the state.

matthewsnyder‭ wrote 4 months ago
copy link

It seems like when used for a wallpaper, feh is designed to pass the image to X and exit. So either I would have to find a way to reinvoke feh when the screen configuration changes, or find another tool.

i3 does get notified about new screens since it adds new workspaces for them. But I don't know how to say "when screens change run this" in the i3 config.

I dunno a way to add a script/hook to X to rerun feh, but at this point it seems a bit complicated just to set a wallpaper. So I'm hoping someone knows a simpler way.