In GNOME based environments, under X11, the average background color of the wallpaper can be obtained with
xprop -root | grep _GNOME_BACKGROUND_REPRESENTATIVE_COLORS
It gives an output like
_GNOME_BACKGROUND_REPRESENTATIVE_COLORS(STRING) = "rgb(65,70,61)"
This is the method Unity used to make the dash have the same color as the wallpaper.
However, xprop does not work in Wayland, and _GNOME_BACKGROUND_REPRESENTATIVE_COLORS would not work in KDE.
Is there any way to get the average color/accent color in KDE with Wayland as well as X11?
I want to use this color to make an app have ``chameleonic" background color.
Kirigami has this function, but I’m not aware of a command-line tool to get it easily.
However if you’re writing an app, you don’t want to use that anyway; you want to use the proper API to access the functionality! You can access it with Kirigami.ImageColors. See the examples in examples/Image Colors · master · Frameworks / Kirigami · GitLab.
The only challenge here will be getting the wallpaper to use as the source. I’m not immediately sure how to do this.
I found another method that works in wayland as well as X11.
The command
gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri
gives me the location of the wallpaper image. Then, I can use imagemagick to get the color
convert "$(gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri | sed -e "s/'file:\/\/\(.*\)'/\1/")" -resize 1x1 txt:- | awk 'NR==2 {print $3}'
Similar methods would work for Cinnamon, MATE and XFCE as well.
Does KDE store the location of its wallpaper somewhere?
Then I can write a simple script in my code to extract the color for every desktop environment.
It’s not quite that simple, since the active wallpaper may not be an image; we support arbitrary wallpaper plugins.
But if it is an image, you’ll find it in ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc. Search for Image=.
Keep in mind that each screen has its own wallpaper, so you might find several.
You did say “an app” not “my apps” so I guess maybe you’re actually developing something new here, but if it’s the end result you’re after, there’s GitHub - luisbocanegra/kde-material-you-colors: Automatic color scheme generator from your wallpaper for KDE Plasma powered by Material You
Just like Nate said, getting what is actually being displayed is not that simple for wallpaper plugins that aren’t a simple static image/color, the way I ended doing it for kde-material-you-colors was with a desktop screenshot fallback but even that isn’t perfect, see Getting wallpaper from Plasma is complicated and prone to errors · Issue #187 · luisbocanegra/kde-material-you-colors · GitHub
I think for this to work reliably Plasma would need to provide a method to query the current view of the desktop background as an image. There is also qdbus org.kde.plasmashell /PlasmaShell org.kde.PlasmaShell.color but that one requires enabling accent color from wallpaper in the color scheme settings.
Thank you. That should cover most use cases
Not quite. I recently rewrote this weather app (Typhoon), and I want to add a Chameleonic background feature.
Thank you all. I will get back if something goes wrong, and will post when the feature is ready.
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I wrote this function to extract the path to the wallpaper
and this lines of code turn the wallpaper into a color code using imagemagick
The app was recently featured in OMG Ubuntu Developer Revives Iconic Desktop Weather App for Linux - OMG! Ubuntu