Parallax wallpaper daemon for Wayland. Uses monocular depth estimation to generate a depth map from any image, then shifts the wallpaper layers based on cursor position. The effect is subtle but satisfying.
Photos by Charles Black, Zeny Rosalina and Lionello DelPiccolo, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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Two binaries:
shiftpaper(CLI) takes a source image, runs a monocular depth model (MoGe-2 by default) via ONNX Runtime, and writes a color + 16-bit depth PNG pair to a cache directory.shiftpaperd(daemon) loads the pre-baked pair and renders a parallax-displaced wallpaper on wlr-layer-shell surfaces using wgpu/Vulkan.
The daemon has no ML dependencies. All inference happens in the CLI.
- Wayland compositor with wlr-layer-shell support (see Compositors)
- Vulkan-capable GPU
- ONNX Runtime (
onnxruntimeon Arch, oronnxruntime-cudato bake on an NVIDIA GPU)
Building from source additionally requires a Rust toolchain.
Arch Linux (AUR):
paru -S shiftpaper # or yay, pikaur, etc.
shiftpaper-git tracks the latest main instead.
From source:
cargo install --path crates/cli
cargo install --path crates/daemon
To run it with systemd, copy shiftpaperd.service into ~/.config/systemd/user/ and change its ExecStart to %h/.cargo/bin/shiftpaperd.
Every command has its own help, so shiftpaper help is a good place to look around.
shiftpaper fetch-model # download the depth model (~420 MB)
shiftpaper set ~/Pictures/wallpaper.jpg # make an image your wallpaper
systemctl --user enable --now shiftpaperd # start the daemon
Then try:
shiftpaper set ~/Pictures/another.jpg # change it
shiftpaper slideshow ~/Pictures/walls # show a folder of images in turn
shiftpaper transition portal # try a different transition
The docs cover the config file, the transitions, depth models and troubleshooting.
Only tested on Hyprland so far. It should work on other compositors with wlr-layer-shell, such as Sway, River, Wayfire, niri and labwc. GNOME and KDE Plasma don't support it.
MIT