flowy

Demo

Usage

• The documentation can be found at https://docs.rs/flowy.
• You can either download the binary or get the Debian package.
• Flowy comes with a preset lake set of wallpapers. See the binary section for more information.
• Flowy can also change the wallpapers based on sunrise and sunset timings of your location. See the Solar section for more information.

Binary

• It can be either found in the Releases section or can be installed using Cargo by running the command cargo install flowy.
• If you use the binary, just run it by typing flowy -d or flowy --dir \path\to\wallpapers to set the path to the wallpaper directory.
• In case you want to use the preset wallpapers, run flowy --preset lake or flowy -p lake. This downloads the Lakeside wallpapers made by Louis Coyle. They can also be found here.
• If you're using Linux, you can let the binary run forever in a terminal session or setup a systemd service so it listens in the background. Checkout the 'Systemd Automation' section for more details.

Systemd Automation (Linux only)

• Instead of letting flowy run in an open terminal, it can be run as a background service.
• Create a file called flowy.service and place it in /etc/systemd/user
• Populate this file with the following contents -

[Unit]
Description=flowy

[Service]
Environment=XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=<value>
ExecStart=<command>

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

• Here, replace the variable <value> with the value of your current Desktop Environment and replace the variable <command> with whatever mode you would flowy to run in (you should ignore the phrase flowy while setting the variable <command>).
• Your current Desktop Environment can be found by running the command echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP.
• After this, one can just run flowy by running the command systemctl --user start flowy.service.
• You can track flowy's status using the command systemctl --user status flowy.service.

Debian Package

• This release has been deprecated.

Wallpapers directory

• The wallpapers inside the directory must be named sequentially.
• For example, if you have 11 wallpapers, the names must be paper-01.jpg, paper-02.jpg....
• It does not matter what the names of the files are as long as they are sequential.

Solar - Sunrise and Sunset

• Flowy can take into account your location's sunrise and sunset timings.
• This option can be used by running flowy --solar /path/to/dir lat lon and passing flowy the path to the wallpapers, latitiude, and longitude of your location.
• Keep in mind that the wallpapers in the path must be segregated by adding DAY or NIGHT tags within the wallpaper names. This is done so that flowy knows which wallpapers to show during the day and which wallpapers to show during the night. The normal sequential numbering rules mentioned in the Wallpapers directory subsections still apply.
• Example naming scheme - DAY-01.jpg, DAY-02.jpg, NIGHT-03.jpg, NIGHT-04.jpg,....
• If you do not want to segregate, use flowy in the normal mode (--dir).

Experimental

• By default, flowy evenly sets the wallpaper change time based on the number of wallpapers there are. In case you would like to modify these times, it can be done so by editing the config.toml file found in the config directory. You need to comment the flowy::generate_config function call in main.rs and then build it after modifying the config file.

  The location of the config directory depends on your operating system:

  • ~/.config/flowy on Linux
  • C:\User\Alice\AppData\Roaming\flowy on Windows (Windows is not supported ATM)
  • /Users/Alice/Library/Preferences/flowy on macOS

Supported Environments

• macOS
• GNOME Based - Ubuntu, Fedora, Pantheon
• Linux Mint Cinnamon
• Linux Mint MATE
• Deepin
• XFCE
• KDE
• BSPWM and i3 (with feh)
• Windows 7/8/10

TODO

• GUI
• Match the stars given the location
• Add support for other platforms, both UNIX and Windows.
• Refactor OS related code to another file