Re: desktop-background.el as a new library?

[Arthur Miller]

Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se> writes:

> I'm looking at teaching image-dired.el to set your desktop background.
> Because A) this finishes a TODO that has been in that file for going on
> 15 years, and B) any respectable image viewer must know how to set your
> desktop background.
>
> However, this code is not really tied to image-dired.el; only one line
> and the name of the defun ties it to that library.  For example, it
> could be used in thumbs.el (that has similar capabilities), and it could
> even be useful as a stand-alone command.
>
> So I started thinking that just like the recently added gravatar.el,
> perhaps we should put this stuff in a new library
> lisp/image/desktop-background.el?
>
> (Or some better name, suggestions welcome.)
>
> Please see the attached tentative diff for image-dired.el to get an
> idea.  (Please ignore the somewhat unwieldy defcustoms; I followed the
> scheme in image-dired.el and intend to clean that up.)
>
> Maybe this will even work automagically on other operating systems than
> GNU/Linux, if the commands it uses has been ported to them.

Are you sure this is really interesting to people who use some kind of DE?

I personally have a simple systemd script that run periodically and change the
background by choosing a random image from a folder with feh.

Have you thought about doing it all with Emacs only. Would be something similar
as what some WMs, DEs do: a fullscreen frame below all other frames and display 
an image from a user customizable path with Emacs image functionality. You could
go extra mile and provide some scaling/centering for the image; but otherwise
you can just left to user to use images with appropriate resolution. Also it
would be trivial to provide a "desktop menu" on that frame. Would need some kind
of "desktop mode" for the buffer that displays image, but I don't think it is
lots of work.

Long time ago I played with that idea; but at the time I didn't know how to
disable input for the background frame, so I didn't continute with that.

That would require no external tools, integration with DEs and whatnot, would be
"all emacs" solution.