feh

feh is a lightweight and powerful image viewer that can also be used to manage the desktop wallpaper for standalone window managers lacking such features.

Installation

Install the feh package.

Usage

feh is highly configurable. For a full list of options, run feh --help or see the feh(1) man page.

Browse images

To quickly browse images in a specific directory, you can launch feh with the following arguments:

$ feh -g 640x480 -d -S filename /path/to/directory

• The -g flag forces the images to appear no larger than 640x480
• The -d flag draws the file name
• The -S filename flag sorts the images by file name

This is just one example; there are many more options available should you desire more flexibility.

Set the wallpaper

can be used to set the desktop wallpaper, for example for window managers without this feature such as Openbox, Fluxbox, and xmonad.

The following command is an example of how to set the initial background:

$ feh --bg-scale /path/to/image.file

Other scaling options include:

To restore the background on the next session, add the following to your startup file (e.g. , ~/.config/openbox/autostart, etc.):

~/.fehbg &

To change the background image, edit the file ~/.fehbg which gets created after running the command mentioned above.

One can explicitly disable the creation of the ~/.fehbg, by passing the flag as well.

To setup different wallpapers for different monitors one should pass as many file paths as many monitors are available. For example, for a dual monitor setup it would be:

$ feh --bg-center path/to/file/for/first/monitor path/to/file/for/second/monitor

Open SVG images

$ feh --conversion-timeout 1 file.svg

Note that this requires the package.

Random background image

You can have feh set a random wallpaper using the option with one of the options, for example:

$ feh --bg-fill --randomize ~/.wallpaper/*

The above command tells feh to randomize the list of files in the directory and set the backgrounds for all available desktops to whichever images are at the front of the randomized list (one unique image for each desktop). You can also do this recursively, if you have your wallpapers divided into subfolders:

$ feh --recursive --bg-fill --randomize ~/.wallpaper

To set a different random wallpaper from each session, add the following to your :

$ feh --bg-max --randomize ~/.wallpaper/* &

Another way to set a random wallpaper on each xorg session is to edit your as following.

$HOME/.fehbg

feh --bg-max --no-fehbg --randomize ~/.wallpaper/* 

Troubleshooting

Using in Cron job

To use feh in a cron job for randomizing your wallpapers, you must to specify the DISPLAY env:

DISPLAY=:0 feh --bg-max --randomize ~/.wallpaper/*