ASCII Reactive Wallpaper

A KDE Plasma 6 wallpaper plugin that renders animated and reactive ASCII art with a native Qt Quick scene-graph renderer.

Version 2.0 adds saved profiles, image-quality controls, live configuration previews, expanded appearance controls, battery-aware pausing, smoother transitions, and substantial renderer allocation reductions.

Features

Modes — Starfield, Matrix rain, Matrix 3D, plasma, fire, aurora, nebula, and ocean waves. Static images rendered as ASCII too.

Visuals — 8 character-ramp presets (block, Braille, geometric, binary, etc.), configurable monospace fonts, glow, foreground opacity, brightness/contrast/gamma, color depth (4–64), and background.

Reactive — Pointer displacement and click ripples with configurable speed and persistence. Battery-aware auto-pausing.

Profiles — Save/restore full config sets covering source, appearance, animation, and reactive settings. Instant switch with last-active restoration.

Image quality — Ordered dithering and edge-aware luminance enhancement for static source images.

Performance — Native batched scene-graph rendering, performance presets, live config previews, smooth crossfades on setting changes.

Requirements

• KDE Plasma 6
• CMake 3.21 or newer
• C++17 compiler
• Qt 6 Core, DBus, Gui, QML, and Quick development files

Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt install build-essential cmake qt6-base-dev qt6-declarative-dev

Install

git clone https://github.com/LilT59/ascii-reactive-wallpaper.git
cd ascii-reactive-wallpaper
./install.sh

Then open the desktop wallpaper settings and select ASCII Reactive Wallpaper. If Plasma already loaded an older native module, switch to another wallpaper and back. Avoid restarting plasmashell as a routine reload method.

Update

git pull
./install.sh

Uninstall

./uninstall.sh

Development

Build the architecture- and Qt-version-specific QML module:

./build-native.sh

The generated library is intentionally excluded from Git. Rebuild it after Qt ABI upgrades.

See CHANGELOG.md for release history.

Validate project files:

qmllint -I contents/ui contents/ui/main.qml contents/ui/config.qml
xmllint --noout contents/config/main.xml
jq empty metadata.json
ldd -r contents/ui/native/libasciireactivepointerplugin.so

Set ASCII_WALLPAPER_PROFILE=1 before starting Plasma to log five-second renderer timing summaries, including character generation, ripple simulation, scene-graph updates, atlas creation, glyph counts, and batch counts.

Troubleshooting

Inspect Plasma logs:

journalctl --user -u plasma-plasmashell.service -f -o cat

Packaging

This plugin contains a native QML extension. Distributions and release packages must compile it against their Qt version and CPU architecture; do not redistribute a locally built .so as a universal package.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.