Where the Settings Live

Documentation / Contents - Background

• Overview of the Background Panel
  • The Two Pages
  • The Buttons Along the Bottom
• Choosing a Pattern
• Choosing a Picture
  • The Picture List
  • The Preview and the Facts Line
• Placing a Picture
  • Fill (crop to fit)
  • Stretch
  • Scale (letterbox)
  • Center
  • Tile
• Colour Schemes
  • The Scheme List
  • Lock Scheme to Wallpaper
  • Make Scheme From Wallpaper
• The Canonical Panels
• Where the Settings Live
  • Adding Your Own Pictures
• Copyright Information

Where the Settings Live

Your choice is written to one plain text file:

~/.cyanotype/cywall.conf    kind, choice, placement

It records which of the two kinds you chose, which one, and how a picture should be placed. The file manager reads the same file when it is asked to draw the desktop, so there is one answer to "what is the background", not two.

Set CYWALL_CONF in your environment to use a different file.

Where the Pictures Are

Wallpapers live under the share directory, filed by size:

share/cywall/1024x768/
share/cywall/1280x1024/
share/cywall/1920x1200/
share/cywall/1920x1080/
share/cywall/3840x2160/

The panel searches the system share directory and your own, which is ~/.cyanotype/share. Run cywall --paths to print every directory that is searched and what was found in each; that is the quickest way to answer "why is my picture not in the list".

Adding Your Own Pictures

1. Convert the picture to the SGI image format, extension .rgb. 2. Drop it into the group directory closest to its size, under ~/.cyanotype/share/cywall/ so that a system update cannot remove it. 3. Reopen the panel. The list is read at start-up.

The name in the list is the file name without its extension, so name the file the way you want to read it.

Where the Schemes Are

Generated schemes are written to:

~/.cyanotype/share/cyscheme/

named for the wallpaper they were built from, so that "Lock scheme to wallpaper" pairs them. See Colour Schemes.

Command Line

cywall                      the extended panel (the default)
cywall --canonical=wall     the IMD Background Setting panel
cywall --canonical=scheme   the IMD Color Scheme browser
cywall --paths              print the search path
cywall --decode FILE        decode a .rgb, report its size
cywall --selftest           run the internal checks and exit
cywall -V                   print the version
cywall -h                   print this list

--decode is the tool to reach for when a picture will not appear or will not draw: it reports what the decoder made of the file.

See The Canonical Panels for the two canonical faces.