Wallder

A live shader wallpaper engine for Wayland compositors, built on Quickshell.

Wallder renders GLSL fragment shaders as animated, full-screen wallpapers across all connected monitors

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Features

• Multi-monitor support — renders independently on every screen
• Per-shader configuration — each shader carries a .meta sidecar file for animation parameters
• Layer shell integration — sits at WlrLayer.Background with exclusiveZone: -1, compatible with any wlr-based compositor (Hyprland, niri, sway, etc.)
• No compositor patches required — pure Quickshell/QML; no native code

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Requirements

• Quickshell
• A Wayland compositor implementing the wlr-layer-shell protocol
• Qt 6 with QtQuick and QtQuick.Effects
• Pre-compiled .qsb shader files (see Shader Format)

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Installation

Clone the repository into your Quickshell configuration directory:

git clone https://github.com/eq-desktop/wallder ~/.config/quickshell/wallder

Then launch it via Quickshell:

WALLDER_SHADER=eyes qs -c wallder

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Configuration

Variable	Default	Description
WALLDER_SHADERS	<shellDir>/shaders	Path to the directory containing shaders
WALLDER_SHADER	"eyes"	Name of the active shader (without extension)

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Shader Format

Each shader consists of two files placed in the shader directory:

<name>.qsb

A compiled Qt Shader Baker (.qsb) binary. The fragment shader receives the following uniforms:

Uniform	Type	Description
resolution	vec2	Dimensions of the output surface in pixels
time	float	Animated time value, driven by NumberAnimation

A minimal shader skeleton:

#version 440

layout(location = 0) in vec2 qt_TexCoord0;
layout(location = 0) out vec4 fragColor;

layout(std140, binding = 0) uniform qt_Uniforms {
    mat4 qt_Matrix;
    float time;
    vec2 resolution;
};

void main() {
    vec2 uv = qt_TexCoord0;
    fragColor = vec4(uv, 0.5 + 0.5 * sin(time * 0.001), 1.0);
}

Compile with qsb:

qsb --glsl 100es,120,150 --hlsl 50 --msl 12 -o shaders/myshader.qsb myshader.frag

<name>.meta

A plain-text sidecar file with key: value pairs, one per line. Supported keys:

Key	Description	Example
duration	Duration of one full animation cycle in milliseconds	duration: 60000
goal	End value of the time uniform per cycle	goal: 200

Example .meta file:

duration: 80000
goal: 150

If no .meta file is present or a key is missing, the values from shaderConfig in shell.qml are used as fallback.

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License

MIT