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

[Arthur Miller]

Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se> writes:

> Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
>
>> Are you sure this is really interesting to people who use some kind of DE?
>
> No, that's why I'm asking the question.  But I note that other image
> viewers has such functionality.
>
>> Have you thought about doing it all with Emacs only.
>
> Not really, no.  It sounds like a lot of work.  :-)
:-) Njah ... :-)

Sorry for little bit late answer on this; but didn't have time to do it back
then, and later I forgott it. But I did a little test/sketch, it isn't very
difficult to get up a frame with a background image. It was really just 10 nin
thing, so no checking for errors, nils etc; just as a demo of the idea.

It has hardcoded path to a directory "~/wallpapers" from which it will choose a
random wallpaper. My wallpapers are all scaled to my desktop size, but it
wouldn't be much work to add like check for scaling and request image to be
rescaled.

I do see some problems, not sure if it is my wm (compiz) or Emacs:

If I add (fullscreen . t) for the frame parameter, Emacs goes nuts: I can't move
or rescale other frames despite frame parameter being only for the background
frame. Without fullscreen parameter there is tiny strip on the right and bottom
edges where real background comes through, and a tiny borders despite me setting
borders to nil. I have tried to make frame slightly bigger then my desk and to
move image to the right and down but those strips are still there.

Besides that, it seems to work fine. As extra bonus user could use "easy menu"
to create desktop menus with elisp and emacs. Could be usable for setups with
simple WMs without wallpaper and desktop menu features.

No extra libraries needed, just plain frame and Emacs compiled with image
support. More work required, if anyone is interested, I am not gonna work more
on it myself.

background.el
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