Awwwall

Animated (GIF) wallpapers for Noctalia, powered by awww — using Noctalia's own wallpaper picker and directory, not a separate one.

Noctalia's built-in wallpaper surface only shows static images. This plugin runs a headless service that watches the wallpaper Noctalia's official picker already recorded for each output and, whenever it changes, hands that same file to awww img. Because Noctalia itself still owns the selection, its Material You palette generation from the wallpaper keeps working exactly as before.

The bar widget's toggle owns the whole awww lifecycle, so there is nothing to set up by hand: turning it on starts awww-daemon (if it isn't already running) and asks Noctalia to drop its own wallpaper surface on each output (setWallpaperEnabled); turning it off restores Noctalia's surface and kills the daemon.

Plugin

Field	Value
ID	0lucasmatheus/awwwall
Entries	Service: mirror; bar widget: toggle

Requirements

• awww (which includes awww-daemon) on PATH.
• A wlr-layer-shell compositor (Niri, Hyprland, Sway, Mango, ...).

Usage

1. Add the Awwwall bar widget from the widget picker.
2. Click it to turn mirroring on. It starts awww-daemon for you if needed.
3. Pick a wallpaper the normal way (Noctalia's own Wallpaper widget / picker) — including GIFs from your configured wallpaper directory. Awwwall detects the change and applies it through awww within about a second.
4. Click the widget again to turn mirroring off; this restores Noctalia's own wallpaper rendering and kills the awww daemon.

IPC

• noctalia msg plugin 0lucasmatheus/awwwall:mirror all toggle — toggles mirroring, same as clicking the bar widget.

Settings

Setting	Type	Default	Description
resize	select	crop	How awww fits the image to the screen (no/crop/fit/stretch).
transition_type	select	random	awww transition effect.
filter	select	Nearest	Scaling filter awww uses when resizing.
transition_duration	int	1	Transition length in seconds (ignored by the simple transition).

Notes

Turning the bar widget on runs awww query to check whether awww-daemon is already running (a plain process-name match can false-positive on unrelated processes), starts it if not, and disables Noctalia's own wallpaper surface per output. From then on, the mirror service polls noctalia.wallpaperPath(connector) once a second and runs awww img <path> -o <connector> with the settings above whenever it changes. Turning the widget off restores Noctalia's surface on every output it had hidden and runs awww kill; the same cleanup runs if the plugin is disabled or Noctalia exits while mirroring is on. The on/off state persists across Noctalia restarts in the plugin's data directory.