swww(1) General Commands Manual swww(1)

swww - A Solution to your Wayland Wallpaper Woes

swww <COMMAND>

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

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

-h, --help

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

-V, --version

Print version

swww is a wallpaper manager that lets you change what your monitors display as a background by controlling the swww-daemon at runtime.

It supports animated gifs and putting different stuff in different monitors. I also did my 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.

Note that swww only works in a compositor that implements the layer-shell protocol. Typically, wlr-roots based compositors.

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.

swww-daemon(1) swww-clear(1) swww-img(1) swww-init(1) swww-kill(1) swww-query(1)

2024-06-09