🖼️ Wallfliper

A minimalist, Rofi/yazi-style wallpaper selector for Wayland.

Borderless, dark, keyboard-first — the wallpapers are the content, the UI disappears. Pick a still image or a looping video, hit Enter, done.

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✨ Features

• Keyboard-first — arrow keys / hjkl / wasd to move, / to filter, Enter to apply. No mouse needed, but it works too (click to select, double-click to apply).
• Images and video wallpapers — via swww, looping video via mpvpaper.
• Smooth transitions — animated switches for both images and video
• Live previews — selecting a video plays a short looping clip right on its thumbnail.
• Audition mode — Space applies a wallpaper but keeps the picker open, so you can flip through options on your real desktop.
• Lightweight & on-demand — launches when you call it, exits cleanly, and never idles in the background. Rendering is handed to detached daemons.
• Restore on login — remembers your last wallpaper so a video survives a reboot.
• Color-scheme integration — tells noctalia / matugen / wallust / pywal to re-theme your system from the new wallpaper.
• Riced to taste — backdrop opacity, made for a layerrule = blur compositor.

🖥️ Supported compositors

Wallfliper draws its picker as a wlr-layer-shell overlay and delegates painting to swww/mpvpaper, so it targets compositors that implement wlr-layer-shell:

Hyprland · Sway · river · Wayfire · niri

Out of scope (no layer-shell, or only partial): KDE Plasma, GNOME, X11, Windows.

🙃 Why this exists

Honestly? I just wanted to give Claude Code a try, and ended up enjoying it a little too much.

Wallfliper was built mostly "low-code" — most of the codebase was written with the help of AI tooling like Claude Code and Google Stitch, with me steering the design, scope and decisions.

📦 Installation

Install from source — works on any supported compositor:

Important

Install PySide6 from your distribution, not pip. layer-shell-qt is a compiled Qt plugin loaded into the running process — its Qt version must match the Qt that PySide6 uses. Distro packages are all built against the same system Qt, so they always match. A pip install PySide6 bundles its own Qt and can mismatch the system layer-shell plugin, causing cryptic load failures.

1. Install the dependencies

Dependency	Purpose	Required?
pyside6	the Qt6 / QML runtime	✅ required
layer-shell-qt	the overlay (org.kde.layershell QML module)	✅ required
swww or awww	image wallpapers (auto-detected)	image support
mpvpaper	video wallpapers	video support
ffmpeg	video thumbnails, previews & color extraction	video extras

On Arch / CachyOS — copy-paste:

sudo pacman -S pyside6 layer-shell-qt swww ffmpeg

paru -S mpvpaper

On other distros — install them with your package manager (names vary, e.g. python3-pyside6). swww and mpvpaper are usually not packaged outside Arch — build them from source (both have simple instructions):

• swww → https://github.com/LGFae/swww (Rust)
• mpvpaper → https://github.com/GhostNaN/mpvpaper

2. Run it

git clone https://github.com/Roberth-Souza/wallfliper
cd wallfliper

python main.py --check        # ✓/✗ report of every dependency
python main.py                # launch

💡 python main.py --check prints a per-dependency report with an install hint for whatever's missing — run it first if anything misbehaves.

⌨️ Usage

Recommended

Bind Wallfliper to a compositor hotkey. Pressing the hotkey again while it's open closes it — it's a toggle.

-- Hyprland (Lua config) — ~/.config/hypr/modules/keybinds.lua
hl.bind("SUPER + W", hl.dsp.exec_cmd("python /path/to/wallfliper/main.py"))

# Sway — ~/.config/sway/config
bindsym $mod+w exec python /path/to/wallfliper/main.py

# niri — ~/.config/niri/config.kdl
binds { Mod+W { spawn "python" "/path/to/wallfliper/main.py"; } }

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Key	Action
↑ ↓ ← → · h j k l · w a s d	Move selection
/	Start searching — then type to filter
Backspace	Edit the filter (empty filter → leave search)
i · v	Toggle the image / video filter (also clickable buttons)
Enter	Apply selected wallpaper and close
Space	Apply but keep open (audition on your desktop)
Esc	Close (or close the settings panel)
Double-click	Apply and close
Click outside the panel	Close
⚙ (gear)	Open settings

Applying an image stops any running video wallpaper — there's only ever one wallpaper at a time.

⚙️ Settings

Click the gear (or it's keyboard-driven: j/k move · ←/→ change · Enter select · Esc close):

• background — backdrop darkness / opacity
• folder — choose your wallpaper directory (via your xdg-desktop-portal file chooser)

🌫️ Blur (optional, Hyprland)

Hyprland blurs windows by default, but not layer-shell surfaces — so Wallfliper starts out unblurred. To get the frosted-glass panel, add a layer rule for its wallfliper namespace:

hl.layer_rule({ name = "wallfliper", match = { namespace = "wallfliper" }, blur = true, ignore_alpha = 0.5 })

Lower the background opacity in Settings to actually see the blur through it.

Verify the namespace any time with hyprctl layers while Wallfliper is open.

Other wlr-layer-shell compositors expose their own blur mechanism (or none) — consult their docs; Wallfliper just provides the transparent surface for them to blur.

🔁 Restore on login

Wallfliper saves the last-applied wallpaper to ~/.config/wallfliper/state.json. wallfliper --restore reads that and re-spawns swww/mpvpaper — so a video wallpaper survives a reboot. (Wallfliper itself doesn't stay running; it just hands the file back to the renderer and exits — mpvpaper is stateless and dies on reboot, so something has to re-launch it, and that's all --restore does.)

python /path/to/wallfliper/main.py --restore   # re-apply the saved wallpaper now

Run it on login from your compositor's autostart, wrapped in a short sleep so the compositor finishes bringing up your desktop first. Without the delay a video wallpaper can come up frozen on a low-res frame: mid-boot the wallpaper surface is briefly reported as "hidden", which trips mpvpaper's auto-pause (a known mpvpaper quirk). A few seconds' delay sidesteps it:

-- Hyprland (Lua config) — inside hl.on("hyprland.start", ...) in your autostart.lua
hl.exec_cmd("sh -c 'sleep 5 && python /path/to/wallfliper/main.py --restore'")

# Sway — ~/.config/sway/config
exec sh -c 'sleep 5 && python /path/to/wallfliper/main.py --restore'

# niri — ~/.config/niri/config.kdl
spawn-at-startup "sh" "-c" "sleep 5 && python /path/to/wallfliper/main.py --restore"

# Wayfire — ~/.config/wayfire.ini
[autostart]
wallfliper = sh -c 'sleep 5 && python /path/to/wallfliper/main.py --restore'

Uses system python (the same interpreter that runs the app) — no virtualenv, no activation. Once you install via a package (e.g. AUR), a real wallfliper command lands on PATH and every line above shortens to just wallfliper --restore.

Alternative: XDG autostart entry

wallfliper --install-autostart writes ~/.config/autostart/wallfliper-restore.desktop (the freedesktop standard). It works on sessions that honor XDG autostart — GNOME/KDE, or wlroots compositors launched via UWSM/systemd. A bare Hyprland/Sway/niri session won't read that folder, so on a plain setup use the compositor exec line above instead.

No background daemon of our own — rendering is handled by swww-daemon / mpvpaper.

🎨 Color-scheme integration

After applying a wallpaper, Wallfliper notifies external color tools so your system color scheme regenerates from it (best-effort, never blocks). It auto-detects noctalia-shell if running; for everything else set color_hook in ~/.config/wallfliper/config.json ({path} is substituted):

{
  "color_hook": "matugen image {path}"
}

Works with matugen / wallust / pywal / any command. For video wallpapers it themes from a still frame extracted with ffmpeg.

🩹 Troubleshooting

First step, always: wallfliper --check — it tells you exactly what's missing.

Symptom	Cause & fix
ImportError / won't start	PySide6 missing — install your distro's pyside6.
"failed to load QML UI"	layer-shell-qt missing — install it (provides org.kde.layershell).
Overlay never appears	Not on a wlr-layer-shell Wayland session — check your compositor.
⚠ "no wallpaper tool found" on apply	Install swww (or awww) for images.
⚠ "mpvpaper is not installed" on apply	Install mpvpaper for video wallpapers.
Video cards show ▶ instead of a frame	Install ffmpeg (thumbnails/previews are optional).
Settings folder picker doesn't open	Install an xdg-desktop-portal backend (e.g. xdg-desktop-portal-gtk or -termfilechooser).

the app still runs and tells you in the status bar what to install.

📄 License

GPL-3.0. PySide6 is used under the LGPL.