I love KDE. I love almost everything about it. It has so many options that are easily discoverable and basically anything you’d ever want to do is just a couple of clicks away. I love how each part of KDE has a button where you can add more features with the “Get more stuff” buttons. I love how feature-rich all the applications are.
There’s one thing I don’t like though. I don’t like that I can’t stretch a wallpaper across all my screens in plasma. NormallR8000P-100NASy I just use a plain color so it’s not a big deal but recently I have been trying out one of those trendy translucent themes with blur and well – a solid color just doesn’t do the theme justice so I set out to find a couple of photos for wallpaper. I don’t want to set each screen to have its own distinct image, I’d really rather one image span all three. This is one place where KDE does not have your back for some reason. So, I wrote a script to look at the current screen layout and chop up an image into 1 image per screen.
The image is first scaled to the total resolution of your desktop, then cropped into pieces based on your screen layout. The files are named displayname-originalfile.ext. It isn’t perfect and probably I should look into maintaining the original aspect ratio since a lot of images big enough to fill 3 monitors are super wide, wider than my actual setup and just straight scaling will stretch it but that could be easily added later. Maybe this will be useful for someone somewhere, maybe not.
The script
I’ll be making a utilities github repository soon, which I will link here later if I remember:
The section below doesn’t encode the greater than and less than signs correctly, I’ll look into fixing it soon. Link to the script on github.
#!/usr/bin/env bash
#LICENSE
# This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain.
#
# Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or
# distribute this software, either in source code form or as a compiled
# binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any
# means.
#
# In jurisdictions that recognize copyright laws, the author or authors
# of this software dedicate any and all copyright interest in the
# software to the public domain. We make this dedication for the benefit
# of the public at large and to the detriment of our heirs and
# successors. We intend this dedication to be an overt act of
# relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights to this
# software under copyright law.
#
# THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
# EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
# MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
# IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR
# OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE,
# ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR
# OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
#
# For more information, please refer to <https://unlicense.org>
# Display help
[ $# -ne 1 -o "${1}" = "--help" -o "${1}" = "-h" ] && echo "Usage: ${0##*/} {OPTION|(file)}
Cuts (file) into pieces based on current monitor layout as seen by xrandr.
OPTION may be
-h or --help to show this help
" && exit
TOTALX=`xrandr | head -n1 | awk '{print $8}'`
TOTALY=`xrandr | head -n1 | awk '{print $10}' | sed s/','//`
#echo "screen is " $TOTALX x $TOTALY
#xrandr outputs in format as follows:
#EXAMPLE: 0: +*DP-4 2560/598x1440/336+1920+0 DP-4
# 0: display number - this would be X Display :0.0
# +*DP-4 + means the display is active, * means it's primary and DP-4 is the name
# 2560/598x1440/336+1920+0 This is the dimensions, physical size and offset.
# 2560 width, 598mm by 1440, 336 mm
# +1920+0 -> offset horizontally by 1920, vertically by 0
# 0,0 for offset is bottom left of entire screen area
readarray -t SCREENS <<< $(xrandr --listactivemonitors|tail -n +2)
for i in "${SCREENS[@]}"
do
#echo "working with: $i"
NAME=`echo $i | cut -d " " -f 2 | sed s/+// | sed s/\*//`
WIDTH=`echo $i | cut -d " " -f 3 | cut -d "/" -f 1`
HEIGHT=`echo $i | cut -d " " -f 3 | cut -d "x" -f 2 | cut -d "/" -f 1`
OFFX=`echo $i | cut -d " " -f 3 | cut -d "+" -f 2`
OFFY=`echo $i | cut -d " " -f 3 | cut -d "+" -f 3`
#echo $NAME is $WIDTH x $HEIGHT offset by $OFFX x and $OFFY y
#echo running convert $1 -filter Cubic -resize "$TOTALX"x"$TOTALY"\! -crop "$WIDTH"x"$HEIGHT"+"$OFFX"+"$OFFY" +repage $NAME-$1
convert $1 -filter Cubic -resize "$TOTALX"x"$TOTALY"\! -crop "$WIDTH"x"$HEIGHT"+"$OFFX"+"$OFFY" +repage $NAME-$1 2>/dev/null
done