Wallpaper
Wallpapers live in the same per-user directory most desktops use, and an SVG one recolors itself to the active color scheme before it's ever applied.
Open the picker from Super → Sobarch → Wallpaper. It lists every file in ~/.local/share/backgrounds/, the per-user counterpart of the /usr/share/backgrounds convention most distros ship their own default wallpapers under. Picking one applies it immediately to every connected monitor (see Multiple monitors for how it's sized to each one), and the picker stays open with your choice marked current, so you can compare a few before pressing Escape. Each entry shows a thumbnail, and names are shown in title case with dashes and underscores turned into spaces and the file extension dropped. The shipped wallpaper is sobarch-wallpaper.svg, used until you pick something else.
SVG wallpapers recolor automatically
A plain raster image (JPG, PNG) is applied as-is. An SVG one can opt into recoloring by giving one element id="sobarch-bg" and another id="sobarch-accent", each with a plain fill="#RRGGBB" attribute. Those two get rewritten to the active scheme's base00/base0D before the file is ever shown, the same colors used across Hyprland, waybar, and everything else Theming covers. Sobarch's own shipped wallpaper (the default until you pick something else) follows this convention; drop your own SVG alongside it to get the same treatment.
The recolored SVG is rasterized to PNG before being handed to hyprpaper. hyprpaper's own raster scaling works correctly, but its SVG decoding doesn't render fills right, so an SVG is always converted first regardless of which app ends up displaying it. An SVG with id="sobarch-bg" is rasterized once per monitor size, at that monitor's exact resolution, rather than once and scaled.
Multiple monitors
Monitors don't need to share a resolution or orientation. How each one is filled depends on the wallpaper:
- An SVG with
id="sobarch-bg"is rendered separately for each monitor size, rotated monitors included. The design is scaled so its shorter edge matches the monitor's shorter edge, then centered, with any leftover space filled in the background color. The artwork comes out the same size on a landscape and a portrait monitor of the same resolution, and never stretched. - Anything else (a JPG, a PNG, or an SVG without
id="sobarch-bg") is scaled to cover each monitor and cropped to fit. An image made for a landscape screen gets enlarged and cut down the middle on a portrait one.
Making your own SVG wallpaper
To get both recoloring and per-monitor fitting:
- Give one element
id="sobarch-bg"and anotherid="sobarch-accent", each with a plainfill="#RRGGBB"attribute (not astyle="fill:..."one). Recoloring only touches those two elements. - Make
sobarch-bga single solid shape covering the whole canvas. The space around the canvas on a differently shaped monitor is filled with that same color, so a gradient or texture there would show visible bars. - Keep anything important within the central ~55% of the canvas's long edge. On a monitor narrower than the design, the canvas's sides are cropped off: a 16:9 design on a 9:16 portrait monitor shows only the middle 56% of its width, and on a 5:4 monitor the middle 70%. A monitor wider than the design loses nothing and just gets more background on the sides. The shipped wallpaper's mark sits within the middle ~38%, so it fits on any of these.
When it re-applies
Nothing needs to be re-picked by hand: the current wallpaper is re-applied automatically whenever you switch color schemes (so an SVG wallpaper stays in sync with the rest of the desktop) and whenever the set of connected monitors changes, in addition to running once whenever you pick something new from the menu.