awww-daemon(1)

💖 awww-daemon — the manual, but make it make sense 💖

Okay bestie, settle in, because this is awww-daemon from the General Commands Manual and she is, lowkey, the main character of your wallpaper setup. 🎀

awww-daemon [OPTIONS]

That's the whole vibe check up front. Now let's get into it. ✨

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🌸 OPTIONS 🌸

• -f, --format <argb|abgr|rgb|bgr> — forces the daemon to use one specific wl_shm format. By default awww-daemon goes with argb, because it's the most widely supported one (slay, compatibility 👑). Generally speaking, formats with 3 channels use 3/4 the memory of formats with 4 channels. Also, bgr formats are more efficient than rgb formats because we don't need to do that extra byte swap when decoding the image — though honestly the difference is unnoticeable, so don't stress it fr fr.
• -l, --layer <background|bottom> — picks which layer the background lives on. Defaults to background. And no, we do not accept the layers top and overlay, because those would make your desktop unusable by simply putting an image on top of literally everything else 💀. If there's ever a use case for them, we can reconsider — but like, not today.
• -n, --namespace <namespace> — which wayland namespace to append to awww-daemon. The resulting namespace will be awww-daemon<specified namespace>. This also affects the name of the awww-daemon socket we use to talk to the client. Specifically, our socket name is ${WAYLAND_DISPLAY}-awww-daemon.<specified namespace>.socket. Some compositors can have several different wallpapers per output, and this is how you tell them apart 🦋. Most users will probably never need to set anything here, no cap.
• --no-cache — don't search the cache for the last wallpaper for each output. Useful if you always want to hand-pick which image awww loads manually using awww img. Very "I'll do it myself" energy 💅.
• -q, --quiet — makes the daemon only log errors. Silence is golden ✨.
• -h, --help — print help (see a summary with -h).
• -V, --version — print version.

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

The awww-daemon runs continuously, just sitting there waiting for commands in ${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR}/awww-${WAYLAND_DISPLAY}.socket — or, if $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR isn't set, in /tmp/awww/awww-${WAYLAND_DISPLAY}.socket. She's patient like that 🫶. The daemon takes care of both creating and deleting that file when it's initialized or killed, so you don't have to clean up after her. Iconic behavior, honestly.

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🎀 SEE ALSO 🎀

awww(1) — go read her too, iykyk 💜

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And that's the page, bestie! 🌈 This one's from the General Commands Manual and it's dated 2026-05-07, so go forth and wallpaper responsibly. Mwah 💋🌸