Wallch

Different backgrounds for different screens

Asked by Richard Kemp

I used a program on Windows7 called DisplayFusion which (amongst other things) had the ability to set wallpaper independently for my two screens, each drawing randomly from a different folder. I found this useful because I have one screen in portrait and one in landscape, so I separated out all my backgrounds into a portrait folder and a landscape folder, and everything went smoothly. A nice addition here would have been if it could detect whether a wallpaper should be portrait or landscdape just by which of it's axes is longer.

Anyway, any chance of support for multiple screens like this in Wallch? If you're not interested in implementing this, how plausible would it be for me to do as an introductory C++ project? (Planning to learn C++ this summer, coming from Java)

Many thanks for what's already a great tool,
Rich

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Alex Solanos (hakermania) said : 		#1

Hello Richard!

We are not really interested in making something like this (at least in the near future), because there are many features waiting to be implemented and the feature you're talking about isn't so popular whithin our users.

As for if you could implement it, I really don't know. According to this: http://askubuntu.com/questions/130514/ubuntu-12-04-wallpaper-problem-when-using-two-monitors , nitrogen is an application that used to (doesn't change the background anymore, it is non-functional) to change the background of each monitor separately.
So, using the command 'apt-get source nitrogen' you will be able to have a look on the code and see how it does it so as to get an idea.

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Richard Kemp (richardtkemp) said : 		#2

Thanks for the tip and the quick reply!

Glad I managed to explain myself properly, you're correct that what I want is basically nitrogen (if it worked) plus wallch. If I did write a patch to implement this feature is there any reason why it might not get accepted, e.g. defence against feature bloat? Is there anywhere I can see planned or requested features, e.g. do you use getsatisfaction.com or similar? I haven't been able to find something like this so far.

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Alex Solanos (hakermania) said : 		#3

Well, we don't have a place where you can see requests and such, you can see here: http://wall-changer.sourceforge.net/downloads/installations.html what we plan to do on our next version.

Anyone can email us to request a feature or post it as answer here, like what you did.

If you are able to add a clickable checkbox at the preferences so as to enable/disable multiple monitors support, and to fix the code so as to actually work, we don't have a reason not to accept it (we will add your name to the credits section of the program as well, then), unless it is very badly written or something like that.

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