Plash

Make any website your Mac desktop wallpaper

Plash enables you to have a highly dynamic desktop wallpaper. You could display your favorite news site, Facebook feed, or a random beautiful scenery photo. The use-cases are limitless. You could even set an animated GIF as wallpaper. You can even add multiple websites and easily switch between them.

Use-cases

Random Unsplash image
Example: https://source.unsplash.com/random/2880x1756?puppy
This returns a new random puppy image each time. See the tip on how to get exact screen size.
Bing Photo of the Day
Calendar
For example, Google Calendar or Outlook 365.
Personal stats
You could even make a custom website for this.
Random street view image
Animated GIF
Example: https://media3.giphy.com/media/xTiTnLmaxrlBHxsMMg/giphy.gif?cid=790b761121c10e72aca8bcfe50b030502b62a69ac7336782&rid=giphy.gif
Random color
Build a custom website
You could build something quick and host it on GitHub Pages, jsfiddle, or CodePen.

Share your use-case

Features

Show a remote or local website
Interact with the website (“Browsing Mode”)
Automatically reload the website at a custom interval
Add multiple websites
Show the website on a different display
Invert website colors (fake dark mode)
Add custom CSS and JavaScript to the website
Lower the opacity
Transparent background
Automatically deactivate while on battery
Audio is muted
Single image will be aspect-filled to your screen
Hide menu bar icon
Scriptable
Share extension

Download

Requires macOS 11 or later.

Last macOS 10.15 compatible version.

Tips

Browsing mode

You can interact with the website by enabling “Browsing Mode”. When in this mode, you can right-click to be able to go back/forward, reload, and zoom in the page contents (the zoom level is saved). You can also pinch to magnify. This is different from zooming the page contents in that it will zoom in to a specific part of the page instead of just enlarging everything.

Plash injects a CSS class named plash-is-browsing-mode on the <html> element while browsing mode is active. You could use this class to customize the website for browsing mode.

If clicking a link opens it in a new window, you can hold the Option key while clicking the link to open it in the main Plash window.

Zoom in website

To zoom in the website, activate “Browsing Mode”, right-click the website, and then select “Zoom In”.

URL placeholders for screen width and height

Use [[screenWidth]] and [[screenHeight]] in any URL and Plash will substitute the right values for you. For example, https://source.unsplash.com/random/[[screenWidth]]x[[screenHeight]]?puppy.

Scroll to position

You can scroll a website to a specific position each time it is loaded by putting the following in the website‘s “JavaScript” field. Adjust the “500” to how far down it should scroll.

window.scrollTo(0, 500);

You can also scroll to a specific element matching a CSS selector:

document.querySelector('.title')?.scrollIntoView();

Make the website occupy only half the screen

You can use the “CSS” field in the website settings to adjust the padding of the website:

:root {
    margin-left: 50% !important;
}

Screenshots

Scripting

You can control Plash using anything that supports opening a URL with a custom scheme.

For example, to reload the current website, run this terminal command:

$ open -g plash:reload

Share extension

Plash comes bundled with a share extension. You can, for example, use it to quickly add a website you have open in Safari to Plash.

Tools

plash-cli - Command-line tool.
alfred-plash - Alfred workflow.
Raycast commands

Commands

`add`

Add a website to Plash.

You can optionally specify a title. If no title is given, a title will be automatically fetched from the website.

$ open -g 'plash:add?url=https://sindresorhus.com/plash&title=Plash%20website'

Don‘t forget to correctly encode query parameters.

Note: Local file URLs are not supported.

`reload`

Reload the current website.

$ open -g plash:reload

`next`

Switch to the next website in the list.

$ open -g plash:next

`previous`

Switch to the previous website in the list.

$ open -g plash:previous

`random`

Switch to a random website in the list.

It will never show the same website twice in a row, unless you only have a single website.

$ open -g plash:random

`toggle-browsing-mode`

Toggle browsing mode.

$ open -g plash:toggle-browsing-mode

Examples

Node.js

import {execFileSync} from 'node:child_process';

execFileSync('open', ['--background', 'plash:reload']);

Swift

import Cocoa

let command = "plash:reload"

let configuration = NSWorkspace.OpenConfiguration()
configuration.activates = false
NSWorkspace.shared.open(URL(string: command)!, configuration: configuration)

AppleScript

do shell script "open --background 'plash:reload'"

Python

import subprocess

subprocess.run(['open', '--background', 'plash:reload'])

FAQ

Can I contribute localizations?

I don't have any immediate plans to localize the app.

What does “Plash” mean?

Click here.

Can you add support for macOS 10.15 or older?

No, this app depends on features only available on macOS 11.

Built with

Defaults - Swifty and modern UserDefaults
KeyboardShortcuts - Add user-customizable global keyboard shortcuts to your macOS app

GauthamPrabhuM / Plash