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swww(1) General Commands Manual swww(1)

NAME

swww - A Solution to your Wayland Wallpaper Woes

SYNOPSIS

swww <COMMAND>

COMMANDS

clear

Fills the specified outputs with the given color

restore

Restores the last displayed image on the specified outputs

clear-cache

Deletes the `swww` cache directory

img

Sends an image (or animated gif) for the daemon to display

kill

Kills the daemon

query

Asks the daemon to print output information (names and dimensions)

help [COMMAND]

Print help or the help of the given command

OPTIONS

-h, --help

Print help (see a summary with '-h')

-V, --version

Print version

DESCRIPTION

swww is a wallpaper manager that lets you change what your monitors display as a background by controlling the swww-daemon at runtime.

It supports animated gifs and putting different stuff in different monitors. I also did my best to make it as resource efficient as possible.

To start, begin by running swww-daemon. That will set up the swww-daemon. Then, you can send images to be displayed with swww img. To kill the daemon, use swww kill.

Note that swww only works in a compositor that implements the layer-shell protocol. Typically, wlr-roots based compositors.

FILES

swww will create the following files in your system:

•
A socket in ${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR}/${WAYLAND_DISPLAY}-swww-daemon.<specified
namespace>.socket, or
/tmp/swww/${WAYLAND_DISPLAY}-swww-daemon.<specificed namespace>.socket, if $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is not set.
•
Cache files in $XDG_CACHE_HOME/swww or $HOME/.cache/swww if $XDG_CACHE_HOME does not exist. These are used to set the wallpaper to the previous image when a monitor is (re)connected or turned on.

SEE ALSO

swww-daemon(1) swww-clear(1) swww-img(1) swww-kill(1) swww-query(1)

2025-09-21