Ever been bored of your same old wallpaper, but too lazy to constantly change it? Introducing autowal, a command line interface to dynamically poll and set aesthetic wallpapers sourced from wallhaven.cc for Mac and Linux.

Still bored? autowal also automatically updates your system-wide colors based on the dominant colors found in the wallpaper using pywal!

autowal poll

• Downloads the first page of wallpapers matching the parameters found in the config.ini file. The first wallpaper downloaded becomes the new wallpaper. Ignores if a poll has been done in the past day.

autowal roll

• Randomly chooses a new downloaded wallpaper to use.

autowal config

• Displays the current configuration file.

autowal

• A combination of both poll and roll. poll will execute if it's been at least one day since the last call. Otherwise, roll will choose a new wallpaper.

To customize the query of wallpapers from wallhaven.cc, please refer to the documentation and update the values within config.ini accordingly.

For ease of access, autowal can be bound to execute on startup, or by a keybind. For example, the following is the configuration for autowal execution when using i3wm, used within i3's config file.

exec_always --no-startup-id autowal
bindsym $mod+c exec --no-startup-id autowal

• pywal. Correct configuration of pywal's features is critical for proper autowal usage
• Unix operating systems are preferred. Windows users will lack complete functionality, and will have to manually set their fallback image filepath.

First, try to use the pre-compiled binary:

git clone https://github.com/isaacchacko/autowal.git
sudo cp autowal/autowal /usr/local/bin/
cp autowal/deadlock.jpg ~/Pictures/deadlock.jpg
rm -rf autowal

If that doesn't work, try compiling locally.

1. Create and populate a virtual environment:

   git clone https://github.com/isaacchacko/autowal.git
   cd autowal
   python3 -m venv venv
   source venv/bin/activate
   pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Compile:

   pyinstaller --onefile cli.py
   sudo cp dist/cli /usr/local/bin/autowal
   cp deadlock.jpg ~/Pictures/deadlock.jpg
   cd ..
   rm -rf autowal

There is a known issue between the pywal library and Windows, especially with changing the background. Although autowal will still continue to download/cycle new color schemes with Windows computers, the background will not change. There is a fork of pywal called winwal which does seem to fix matters, although this code is not incorporated into autowal.