tl;dr

Set gifs as background in i3wm.

Run:

$ ./generate_pngs.sh ~/my_gif.gif

and then:

$ ~/loop_pngs.sh ~/my_gif

Result

https://giphy.com/gifs/UWDwB6IfEZx8QkelUP

Intro

Backgrounds are lovely whether they are gray-scale or rainbow-colored, minimal or exuberant, low quality or 4K, static or dynamic.

-dynamic you say?!

-Aye!

Animated-background

This is a teeny tiny collection of scripts that allows you to set a gif as a background. To my knowledge it works fine in i3 using Xorg. You will have to install some basic programs to make use of it, although you will probably have them already installed in your system. There are:

1. imagemagick - for convert
2. feh - for setting background

Now, let's make it move!

Find a gif

Go ahead and find a gif. You'd appreciate a good quality one. I have included some I found around at /gifs. Moving on!

Set it as background

Clone it

Business as usual:

$ git clone https://github.com/sdaveas/animated-background
$ cd animated-background/scripts # (optional)

Chop it

First, execute:

$ ~/path-to-repo/generate_pngs.sh ~/path-to-gif/awesome.gif

This will create a folder under the name awesome in the directory from which you executed ./generate_pngs.sh. In this case, the folder is at ~/awesome. You can do this from anywhere of course, or move it later.

Loop it

Now that you have all images in a single directory, run:

$ ~/path-to-repo/loop_pngs.sh ~/awesome

Your background should now be awesome (dot gif).

Run it silently

If you want to have the animated background to run at, well, the background you can run it as such:

$ ~/path-to-repo/loop_pngs.sh ~/awesome &
$ disown && exit

If you want to run it when i3 boots up, then add the following line to your i3/config:

exec --no-startup-id /path-to-repo/animated-background/scripts/loop_pngs.sh ~/awesome

Other usages

If you are not into animation, then you can use the script to simply update your backgrounds periodically. You can create a folder with your favourite images and run:

~/path-to-repo/loop_pngs.sh ~/my_favourite_images 900

This will rotate through your images every 15 minutes. You will have not to worry about performance issues in this case.

Notes

Refresh rate

You can optionally change the default refresh rate of by giving a second argument at loop_png.sh like such:

$ ./loop_pngs.sh ~/Desktop/forest 0.05

This will force the gif to update every 0.05 seconds. The default value is 0.1 seconds.

Resource Usage

Bear in mind that using animated background can be computationally intensive, especially when at frequent refresh! Personally, 0.1 sec refresh rate is OK for my laptop, but you maybe want to adjust this.

I know that this can be vastly optimized in terms of performance. For now, since my laptop can handle it without significant performance issues and it is only 2 commands long, so I use it. Maybe you will also.

Similar things

If you are into moving backgrounds, you might be interested in this.