shaderbg

This program lets you render shaders as a wall paper.[0] It works on Wayland compositors that support wlr-layer-shell.

[0] This program was inspired by, has a similar command line interface as, glpaper.

Usage

shaderbg [-h|--fps F|--layer l] output-name shader.frag

The parameter layer should be one of 'background', 'bottom', 'top', 'overlay'.

output-name should be either the name of an output (on Sway, these can be determined using swaymsg -t get_outputs) or the value * to match any output. To prevent the shell from expanding the * symbol, write shaderbg '*' shader.frag.

shaderbg runs shaders that conform roughly to the Shadertoy interface[0]. That is, shaders should implement

void mainImage( out vec4 fragColor, in vec2 fragCoord )
{
}

Currently supported uniforms are

• float iTime measured in seconds since the program started
• vec3 iResolution, whose first two coordinates give the current frame size in pixels.
• float iTimeDelta
• float iFrame
• vec4 iMouse

A few example shaders are provided in the demo/ folder.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20230301165944/https://www.shadertoy.com/howto

Installation

Build with meson. Requires EGL, OpenGL, and wayland.