awww-daemon(1) General Commands Manual awww-daemon(1)

awww-daemon

awww-daemon [OPTIONS]

-f,--format <argb|abgr|rgb|bgr>

Force the daemon to use a specific wl_shm format.

By default, awww-daemon will use argb, because it is most widely supported. Generally speaking, formats with 3 channels will use 3/4 the memory of formats with 4 channels. Also, bgr formats are more efficient than rgb formats because we do not need to do an extra swap of the bytes when decoding the image (though the difference is unnoticiable).

-l,--layer <background|bottom>

Which layer to display the background in. Defaults to background.

We do not accept layers top and overlay because those would make your desktoop unusable by simply putting an image on top of everything else. If there is ever a use case for these, we can reconsider it.

-n,--namespace <namespace>

Which wayland namespace to append to awww-daemon.

The result namespace will the awww-daemon<specified namespace>. This also affects the name of the awww-daemon socket we will use to communicate with the client. Specifically, our socket name is ${WAYLAND_DISPLAY}-awww-daemon.<specified namespace>.socket.

Some compositors can have several different wallpapers per output. This allows you to differentiate between them. Most users will probably not have to set anything in this option.

--no-cache

Don't search the cache for the last wallpaper for each output. Useful if you always want to select which image 'awww' loads manually using 'awww img'

-q,--quiet

Makes the daemon only log errors.

-h, --help

Print help (see a summary with '-h')

-V, --version

Print version

The awww-daemon will run continuously, waiting for commands in ${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR}/awww-${WAYLAND_DISPLAY}.socket (or /tmp/awww/awww-${WAYLAND_DISPLAY}.socket, if $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is not set). The daemon will take care of both creating and deleting that file when it is initialized or killed.

awww(1)

2026-03-24