Instead of calling WMX directly, I launch it from a script that launches the screensaver, sets an environment variable, and uses feh to set a wallpaper. To set a wallpaper, the feh command has to call the file directly, so I have a line like:<\/p>\n
I have WMX alongside the Cinnamon desktop environment. It occurred to me, what if I could just have feh call the wallpaper that I have set in Cinnamon<\/a>? That’s just stored in dconf. It did not come together quickly, I had to consult the Googles which led me to several Stack Overflow pages, I experimented with grep and awk and pipes, but I was able to cobble together code that did what I wanted: extract the filename, truncate it down, pass it to feh. This is what I have in my bash script that launches WMX.<\/p>\n The first line is just a comment.<\/p>\n The second line uses gsettings to get the path to the wallpaper and assigns it to a variable.<\/p>\n The third line chops the first 8 characters as well as the last off the variable and assigns that result to a new variable.<\/p>\n The fourth and final line calls feh (which sets the background image or wallpaper) and passes it the new, truncated variable.<\/p>\n Voila!<\/i><\/p>\n I look at it, and it looks so simple, but I spent about two hours on it last night and another half hour this morning. Bash scripting isn’t something I know. I can write a script that chains a lot of commands together, but variables were new and unknown to me… and they’re still<\/i> new and unknown! \ud83d\ude06<\/p>\n So now, when\/if I change my Cinnamon wallpaper, the wallpaper will change automatically in WMX. If I want to change that, I can just comment out the line that sets the wallpaper using my variable and call a specific file directly as above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Occasionally, I have a good idea, and occasionally, I can make it work. Case in point. Sometimes I will use an old and obscure window manager for Linux called WMX. It’s minimalist and spartan. No panels, no background, barely a menu. It can launch a terminal and scroll through workspaces. You can set up aContinue reading “Occasionally Clever”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[763],"tags":[5145,4860,5146,5304],"class_list":["post-35074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux","tag-cinnamon","tag-linux-mint","tag-linux-mint-debian-edition","tag-wmx","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35074\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}feh --bg-fill \/home\/allyn\/Pictures\/backgrounds\/historical\/baltimore-1872.jpg &<\/code><\/p>\ngsettings get org.cinnamon.desktop.background picture-uri<\/code> will extract the filename. That command comes out in a format like this: 'file:\/\/\/home\/allyn\/Pictures\/backgrounds\/bbc-ulysses\/1600-blue-mouldy.jpg'<\/code> feh would not work with that, so I had to take the single quotes off and, just in case, the file prefix and leading slashes, to get it down to this: \/home\/allyn\/Pictures\/backgrounds\/bbc-ulysses\/1600-blue-mouldy.jpg<\/code>.<\/p>\n# Wallpaper
\nbackground_uri=$(gsettings get org.cinnamon.desktop.background picture-uri)
\nwallpaper=${background_uri:8:-1}
\nfeh --bg-fill $wallpaper
\n<\/code><\/p>\n![\"Linux](\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Screenshot_20260112_122344.jpg\")
<\/p>\n