swww(1)

💅 swww(1) — the manual page, but make it cute

okay so you opened swww(1), the General Commands Manual entry for swww. bestie, you're in the right place, sit down, grab a snack 🍓

---

🌸 NAME

swww — A Solution to your Wayland Wallpaper Woes ✨ (yes that's the actual official name, it ate)

🦋 SYNOPSIS

swww <COMMAND>

that's it. one command slot. the rest is vibes 💜

🎀 COMMANDS

• clear — Fills the specified outputs with the given color 🖌️
• restore — Restores the last displayed image on the specified outputs ⏪
• clear-cache — Fills the specified outputs with the given color (yes, the description literally says the same thing as clear — that's what the page says, i'm just the messenger 🙈)
• img — Sends an image (or animated gif) for the daemon to display 🖼️
• init — Initializes the daemon 🌱
• kill — Kills the daemon 💀
• query — Asks the daemon to print output information (names and dimensions) 🔍
• help [COMMAND] — Print help or the help of the given command 🫶

✨ OPTIONS

• -h, --help — Print help (see a summary with -h) 📖
• -V, --version — Print version 🏷️

👑 DESCRIPTION

swww is a wallpaper manager, and the entire concept is iconic: it lets you change what your monitors display as a background by controlling the swww-daemon at runtime. main character energy for your desktop fr fr 🌈

It supports animated gifs 🎞️ and putting different stuff in different monitors. and — not me bragging — the author also did their best to make it as resource efficient as possible 🔥

To start, begin by running swww init. That will set up the swww-daemon. Then, you can send images to be displayed with swww img. To kill the daemon, use swww kill. that's the whole flow, lowkey simple 💖

⚠️ heads up bestie: note that swww only works in a compositor that implements the layer-shell protocol. Typically, wlr-roots based compositors. so do a vibe check on your compositor first, otherwise nothing's happening 💀

🧚 FILES

swww will create the following files in your system:

• A socket in ${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR}/swww-${WAYLAND_DISPLAY}.socket, or /tmp/swww/swww-${WAYLAND_DISPLAY}.socket, if $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is not set.
• Cache files in $XDG_CACHE_HOME/swww or $HOME/.cache/swww if $XDG_CACHE_HOME does not exist. These are used to set the wallpaper to the previous image when a monitor is (re)connected or turned on. 🖥️✨

🌟 SEE ALSO

swww-daemon(1) swww-clear(1) swww-img(1) swww-init(1) swww-kill(1) swww-query(1) — go read the whole fam 🫶

---

and that's the page!! 🎀 it's from 2024-05-05, part of the swww(1) General Commands Manual, so if anything's different in your version, that's on the version, not on me 💅 slay, go set a wallpaper 🦋