joshiemoore / xwow

dynamic/interactive desktop backgrounds for X11

xwow

xwow is a lightweight program for X11 that draws dynamic and interactive desktop backgrounds.

This program is intended for use with simple/non-bloat window managers, such as dwm. It may not work correctly in full desktop environments such as KDE or GNOME, as these draw layers over the root window, rendering it invisible.

Demo on YouTube

Building

Library requirements: Xlib, SDL2

1. Clone this repository, and cd into it.
2. See the "USER CONFIG" section of xwow.h and decide whether you'd like to tweak anything.
3. $ sudo make install.
4. xwow will be installed on your system.

Running

$ xwow will begin drawing a random background.

$ xwow [id] will draw a specific background, where id is an ID from the list below.

You can add xwow & or xwow [id] & to your ~/.xinitrc to automatically start drawing backgrounds when X starts.

Contributing

If you would like to add a background to xwow, consider the following workflow. Feel free to reach out if you have questions.

Assume you're creating a background named <name>.

1. Create bg/bg_<name>.h and bg/bg_<name>.c. These files are where you'll write your rendering code.
2. Create a rendering function in bg/bg_<name>.c which accepts an SDL2 SDL_Renderer* as an argument and draws to this renderer. See other modules in the bg/ directory to get you started. You can almost consider some of the simpler ones to be like templates.
3. Add #include "bg/bg_<name>.h" to the end of the list of includes in xwow.h.
4. Add a pointer to your rendering function to the end of the BG_RENDER_FUNCS[] array. E.g. &bg_<name>_draw.
5. Add bg/bg_<name>.o to the BLD list at the top of the Makefile.
6. Done! Feel free to open a PR.

The render function you created will be called once per frame as long as your background is running.

Background ID List

The following is a list of IDs and descriptions for all of the backgrounds in xwow, to be used in $ xwow [id].

ID	Description
0	bg_corners - lines from corners to cursor
1	bg_fade - slow fading colors
2	bg_cyber - synthwave-style low-poly sunset
3	bg_square - square that bounces around the screen and changes colors
4	bg_party - party mode