Ferris Animated Wallpaper

Animated desktop companion, making Ferris the crab move across your screen and react to your scrolling and clicks.

ferris-animated-wall is a simple Rust application that spawns a transparent, borderless window on X11-based Linux desktops, rendering an animated Ferris crab that wanders across your screen, without affecting the interaction with the rest of the system.

This project was originally created as a first exploration of the Rust programming language, serving as a way to learn and better understand its ecosystem.

Features

• Create a new X11 window with given opacity and type (desktop vs dock)
• Load the .png images
• Communicate with the X11 server to get the relevant system information
• Use the XFixes and Shape extensions extension to make the window click-through
• Use the Shape extension to remove the background of the image
• Use the XInput to catch raw button press events
• Make the created image move randomly on click and in the direction of the cursor on scroll events

Installation & Usage

Prerequisites :

• A Linux system with X11 server running. Shape / XFixes / XInput extensions are also needed.
• Rust installed (with cargo package manager).

Installation steps :

1. Clone the repository.

git clone https://github.com/delcourtfl/ferris-animated-wall.git

2. Navigate to the project directory.

cd ferris-animated-wall/

3. Build and run the project.

cargo run --release
# or with custom parameters:
cargo run --release -- --speed 50 --width 100 --opacity 120

Configuration Parameters

• --width (u16, default: 120)
  The ouput width of the displayed image in pixels.

• --height (u16, default: 120)
  The ouput height of the displayed image in pixels.

• --alpha_threshold (u8, default: 200)
  The minimum alpha (transparency) value the image pixel must have to be visible.

• --opacity (u8, default: 192)
  The opacity of the application window.

• --speed (u16, default: 80)
  The speed at which the image moves to the cursor position.

• --in_background (bool, default: false)
  If set to true, the window will stay behind all others (desktop/background mode).
  If false, the window stays on top (dock/overlay mode).

Technologies Used

• Rust programming language.
• x11rb for rust X11 bindings.
• X11 server the X Window System for window management (client-server architecture).

Areas of Improvement

• Support multiple animations / images at the same time.
• Fetch and display messages (Xft over x11 core font as they are deprecated ?).
• React to some user events.

License

MIT License

Acknowledgement

• The nice x11rb repository tutorial, examples, and xtrace implementation (https://github.com/psychon/x11rb/tree/master/x11rb/examples) which helped a lot.
• X11 protocol documentation website (https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/).
• Ferris artworks by the Rust community (https://rustacean.net/).