Randomize Wallpapers For Sway Using Python

Summary

I’ve been working on improving my setup for development and personal use. I’ve began to ever so slowly do this over the course of a couple of months and I’m starting to enjoy the tiling window manager Sway.

Sway is simple to use and setup; with it being similar to i3 window manager. Which makes it perfect considering that I’ve come to warm up to Wayland overall.

But, with that comes a very minor issue that I just solved today. I tend to enjoy having a different background every other startup or reload as a personal preference. I also needed to dust off some of my Python chops. I haven’t written anything in Python in probably a month. So, this seemed to be a good reason to write something for it.

The script is pretty simple. So, if anyone would rather just read it. Then below is the path to the script.

• n3s0/scripts/python/randfile

I think that settles the introductions. Now on to the script and the solution.

Scripted Solution

A bulk of the work performed by the script is a function named randomFile() which ingests a directory path.

It will check to make sure the base path exists and is a directory.

Create an empty list and add every absolute path to all of the files in the directory if it’s a file.

Then it will use the random.choice() method to provide a random file.

def randomFile(dir_path):
    """Outputs the full path of a random file in specified directory"""
    if not os.path.exists(dir_path):
        sys.exit("path does not exist")
    if not os.path.isdir(dir_path):
        sys.exit("input is not a directory")

    file_paths = []

    for file in os.listdir(dir_path):
        abs_path = os.path.join(dir_path, file)
        if os.path.isfile(abs_path):
            file_paths.append(abs_path)

    return random.choice(file_paths)

That is a gist of what it does. Couple that with some argument handling and a print statement to output the path and we’re done. I’ll be updating this regualrly as I see better ways to improve it.

if __name__ == "__main__":
    args = sys.argv
    arg_count = len(args)

    if arg_count == 0:
        print ("randomfile")
        print ("usage: randomfile [dirpath]")

    if arg_count > 2:
        sys.exit("more then one argument was provided")

    path = args[1]

    random_path = randomFile(path)

    print (f"{random_path}")

Problem Solved

In the configuration file for the Sway there is a section for setting the background on all displays. This part of the configuration can take the output from bash command substitution; e.g. $(). So it can run the script no problem. So I updated the following line.

This will run the script from the .config/wallpaper/ path and output the choice the script provides.

output * bg $(~/.local/scripts/python/randfile/randfile ~/.config/wallpaper/) fill