Parallax wallpaper daemon for Wayland. Uses monocular depth estimation to generate a depth map from any image, then shifts the wallpaper layers based on cursor position. The effect is subtle but satisfying.

Experimental. Built and tested on a single machine (Arch, Hyprland, RTX 5060). Expect rough edges.

How it works

Two binaries:

• shiftpaper (CLI) takes a source image, runs Depth Anything V2/V3 inference via ONNX Runtime, and writes a color + 16-bit depth PNG pair to a cache directory.
• shiftpaperd (daemon) loads the pre-baked pair and renders a parallax-displaced wallpaper on wlr-layer-shell surfaces using wgpu/Vulkan.

The daemon has no ML dependencies. All inference happens in the CLI.

Dependencies

• Wayland compositor with wlr-layer-shell support (see Supported compositors)
• Vulkan-capable GPU
• ONNX Runtime (onnxruntime on Arch; pick a CUDA or ROCm variant if you want GPU inference)

Building from source additionally requires a Rust toolchain.

The depth model is downloaded automatically by shiftpaper fetch-model.

Install

Arch Linux (AUR)

paru -S shiftpaper        # or yay, pikaur, etc.

From source

cargo install --path crates/cli
cargo install --path crates/daemon

If you want to use the systemd user service with a source build, install to somewhere like /usr/local so the binaries are in systemd's lookup path:

cargo install --root /usr/local --path crates/cli
cargo install --root /usr/local --path crates/daemon

Quick start

shiftpaper fetch-model
shiftpaper set ~/Pictures/wallpaper.jpg

fetch-model downloads Depth Anything V2 Small (~97 MB) from HuggingFace to ~/.local/share/shiftpaper/models/ and saves the path to config. After that, set needs no --model flag.

If you already have a model, skip fetch-model and pass it directly:

shiftpaper set ~/Pictures/wallpaper.jpg --model ~/path/to/model.onnx

The model path is saved to config so --model is only needed once.

Running the daemon

Directly:

shiftpaperd

As a systemd user service. The AUR package ships the unit file at /usr/lib/systemd/user/, so:

systemctl --user enable --now shiftpaperd

For source installs, copy the unit file first:

cp shiftpaperd.service ~/.config/systemd/user/
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now shiftpaperd

Change wallpapers without restarting:

shiftpaper set ~/Pictures/new_wallpaper.jpg
systemctl --user reload shiftpaperd

CLI referenceland

Config

Lives at ~/.config/shiftpaper/config.toml. Mostly managed by the CLI but you can edit it by hand.

[daemon]
parallax_intensity = 0.025
tracking_mode = "pointer"       # "pointer" (Wayland-native) or "hyprland" (IPC)
idle_timeout_secs = 300
battery_threshold = 20          # percent; 0 to disable

[inference]
model_path = "~/.local/share/shiftpaper/models/depth_anything_v2_small.onnx"

[wallpaper]
color = "~/.cache/shiftpaper/wallpapers/abc123.color.png"
# depth is inferred from color path; override with:
# depth = "/path/to/custom.depth16.png"

Tracking modes

pointer (default): Uses Wayland pointer events. Works on any wlr-layer-shell compositor. Parallax only active when the cursor is over visible desktop. Stops rendering entirely when the cursor is over a window, which is good for battery.

hyprland: Polls the Hyprland IPC socket for global cursor position. Parallax stays active even when windows cover the desktop. Hyprland-only. Note that this lets the daemon observe cursor position over arbitrary windows.

Supported compositors

Requires wlr-layer-shell. Tested compositors:

• Hyprland
• Sway
• River
• Wayfire
• niri
• labwc

GNOME and KDE Plasma do not implement wlr-layer-shell and are not supported.

License

MIT