Animated wallpapers that breathe life into your desktop — and color into your theme.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PSGtatitos/papyrus/main/install.sh | bash
Set any MP4, WebM, MKV, AVI or MOV file as a live looping wallpaper via mpvpaper. No Wallpaper Engine required.
Auto-switch between your wallpapers at a set interval. Choose random or sequential order — your desktop stays fresh.
Point Papyrus at any folder full of video files. It scans, generates thumbnails, and adds them to your grid instantly.
Papyrus extracts the most vibrant color from your wallpaper and applies it as your COSMIC accent color — live, no restart.
Detects average brightness from your wallpaper and switches COSMIC between dark and light mode automatically.
Video thumbnails are auto-generated with ffmpeg so you can browse your collection visually before applying.
One toggle persists your wallpaper across reboots by writing an autostart desktop entry automatically.
Papyrus checks for updates automatically. When a new version is available, download and install it in one click.
No accounts, no cloud, no analytics. Config is a plain JSON file at ~/.config/papyrus/config.json. That's it.
Click any video thumbnail in the Papyrus grid. The app kills any running mpvpaper instance and starts a new one with loop enabled on your Wayland output.
Pillow samples every pixel in the thumbnail, scores each by vibrancy (saturation × brightness), and picks the most vivid color as your new accent.
Papyrus writes the color directly to COSMIC's compiled theme config in RON format. COSMIC watches these files via inotify and applies changes instantly — no logout needed.
Panel, dock, windows, and accent colors all shift to match the mood of your wallpaper. Dark wallpaper → dark mode. Bright wallpaper → light mode.
One command. No accounts. No nonsense.