The Rio window manager for Plan 9, now with wallpapers
In the Fall of 2021 I was in lab with another TA making jokes about running Doom. I said I wanted to do a similar concept where I put the Windows XP hills background in places it does not belong. Given my research with Plan 9, I decided to start there. I used https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/rio.html as a starting point, but have heavily expanded on this.
Once I had completed my project, I learned Rob Pike once said:
the clean appearance of the screen comes mostly from laziness, but the color scheme is (obviously) deliberate. the intent was to build on an observation by edward tufte that the human system likes nature and nature is full of pale colors, so something you're going to look at all day might best serve if it were also in relaxing shades. renee french helped me with the specifics of the color scheme (she's a professional illustrator and my color vision is suspect), once i'd figured out how i wanted it to look. there are still some features of the color system that i put in that i think no one has ever noticed. that's a good thing, in my opinion; the colors should fade away, if you'll pardon the expression.
having used other systems with different approaches to color screens, most especially windows XP (extra pukey), i think tufte was right.
-rob
While this project is titled Interactive Wallpaper for Rio, an alternative and perhaps more accurate title is A Formal Apology to Rob Pike
I haven't had the time to look into how to make a patch and I've edited a few different files here, so this repo is just all the Rio source code, and I'll look into patches and such later.
With the exception of the imgs/ directory. these files belong in
/sys/src/cmd/rio in the Plan 9 operating system. From there, it's as simple
as
$ mk install
$ mk clean
$ fshalt -r
Basically, run the mkfile that's in the /sys/src/cmd/rio source code
directory. then restart the system.
All images used as a background must be in the Plan 9 image format. This can be done with:
FMT -9t wallpaper.FMT > wallpaper
Where FMT is replaced with the image format. Supported formats include jpg,
gif, png, ppm, bmp, and yuv.
To interact with the wallpaper, change the file, and set up how it's scaled,
echo commands to the /dev/wctl file.
echo wallpaper [-f filename] [-x scale] [-y scale] > /dev/wctl
All arguments are optional. Running the command without arguments will "refresh" the wallpaper.
The filename should be the absolute path to the file. I haven't yet tried with
with relative paths, now that I think about it. Setting -x and -y to 0 and 1
will scale the image to fit the screen in the x or y dimension. I included
images below to demonstrate this.
This isn't as clean as I'd like it, but to have the wallpaper loaded automatically on start up, there's a few parts.
First, create the file usr/glenda/lib/autowp where glenda is your username.
This file should have the following contents:
#!/bin/rc
echo wallpaper -f /usr/glenda/lib/wallpaper > /dev/wctl
Basically, this file should have the wctl command that we want to have on
start up. Automatically, the wallpaper is set to be scaled by both the x and y
components. This could lead to a warped image, but it's really up to the user
and what they want. For the wallpaper I'm using on the screen I'm using, you
don't get much warp. If you want to change how x and y are scaled or where the
wallpaper source file is pulled from, you can specify that here.
Then, in /bin/riostart include the following:
window -r 0 0 161 117 /usr/glenda/lib/autowp
When running exec rio -i riostart on start up, this will create a quick
window in the top left corner which executes the wctl command and then closes.
I hide this window underneath where my CPU usage will be.
When opening up the middle and right click menu or moving or resizing windows, the wallpaper "erases" itself and doesn't refresh properly. This can be fixed by either resizing the window that has the background, or refreshing the wallpaper by calling:
echo wallpaper > /dev/wctl
