How to get an animated background in E2*

Howtos Elive
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How to get an animated background in E2*

Getting an animated background is easy in Enlightenment.

  1. Find an animated background.
    My favourite source is chrisripp, the author of NightBlue (the theme).
  2. Download the files.
    In chrisripp's repo, it's as simple as cloning it. So just launch a terminal, type gfc https://github.com/chrisripp/Animated-background, and it will be in /home/<user>/Animated-background.
    Be aware that it is quite a hefty download (560 Mb) and will take time.
    Optionally you can download only a specific theme/animation by downloading the wanted .edj file and the folder of the same name that contain all the needed graphics.
  3. Install it!
    It's not as easy as double-click, but all you really have to do is navigate to Settings>Wallpaper. Choose Personal and then Import File.... Navigate to the .edj of the one you want -- my preferred one would be mandalorian.edj. In case you can't tell whether they're .edj files or not, you want to pick one and then check the filename, here is an example:

    (The arrow is pointing to the filename.)
    Then click Apply, and you can close it

TIP
Some of the themes/animation do have folders but not an .edj file.
You can create those yourself by running the "build.sh" inside the directory.

  • Not all will build without errors depending on your machine and Enlightenment version, though.
1 Like
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I don't see Wallpaper anywhere. I can see Backgrounds from Desktop but it doesn't do anything.

???

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Greetings @MomboMan to the forum, the place for questions, howtos, laughs, opinions, and just a kind / vibrant community. :smiley14:

I don't have access to Elive right now so I'll have to do it in a bit.

I don't really understand your problem...could you elaborate? Thanks!

1 Like
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I left click on the background, select Enlightenment -> Settings and I get a popup. 17 tabs on the left and one is Backgrounds. If select it I get a bunch of backgrounds but I can't add or load or anything but pick one from the list.

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Ah, that's a simple solution:

You don't click on the Settings option, just hover.

If you know of a way to more clearly state this, you can click the EDIT button under the post and edit away (only in howtos).

I just checked -- you don't have the permissions for this, so what you have to do to get the permission is:

Get to trust level 1 by…

  • Entering at least 5 topics
  • Reading at least 30 posts
  • Spend a total of 10 minutes reading posts

Then you can edit any howto you like. :smiley14:

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Erm maybe you could set up a small gallery showing the named animations.
Considering you, by the look of it, have already downloaded/cloned the repo :thinking:

On top, they don't all seem to "animate" on my E24 dark-theme .... do they work on your machine?
The mandalorian works but i.e bull and birds don't.

On another level ... I do find those that work a bit "over the top" in either their color settings or animations.

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Yikes. Glad you caught that.

Opened an issue here:

Sure, and maybe downloading individuals ones too (save bandwidth and disk space). Not a bad idea, will do when I have time.

Not sure what you're getting at there. Could you please elaborate?

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maybe I am too stupid but I don't have "gfc" nor do I know how to get it

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Are you typing it into a terminal or looking for it in the Enlightenment menu?

If the former, try replacing gfc with git clone.

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was typing into terminal, but job done - i used git

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That's very odd that the aliases were gone. That happened to me once but it fixed itself. :thinking:

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Uh, it was an alias - I don't like that. in the early days (ck in the 90ties) I used them a lot with the consequence that I lost knowledge of the tru commands

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You should have it, it's an alias on Elive.
Just type "alias |grep gfc" and you'll see.
gfc='is_alias=1 git clone'

  • A handy trick when looking for a command (or an existing path):

Type the beginning of the the command (i.e "gf") and hit the TAB key for an "autocomplete". It saves from typos too. :coding:

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True, that is a risk ...... but if you use i.e "git" a lot it saves a lot of typing.

Frankly if you use git on the commandline, fully as it should be used, it'll harass about the availability of the aliases. :face_vomiting:

1 Like
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Yep, this is REALLY annoying. Would even be nice if it was a little more compact - but I can't even see the output of some commands due to this. :face_with_head_bandage:

Agreed in full. If I knew how I would probably add a few more images to do this, but unfortunately I don't know how it was done originally and chrisripp hasn't responded to even the bug with the exception of the comment from right after the issue was opened. :face_with_head_bandage:

I'll prolly do it tomorrow after school if I remember - remind me soon. :slight_smile:

Damn, I forgot about this. I'll have to fix all the screenshots. (Yes there's only one in this guide - will have to remedy that - but there are other guides with them. :sniff:)

Yes it does save from typos...tho if you type 2 letters and TAB the time it takes for the ... to appear and then the results to appear is way too long for me...normally i only do it with long commands, commands/files i cant remember, and commands with typos (it can fix minor typos).

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Well most animations are GIF based and it's a matter of, very conscientiously making sure the last few images in the loop are exactly the same as the first whilst also keeping the cadence in mind.

And I luuuv the Elive zsh feature of doing history search with arrow up/down. :madness:
That is a real time saver.

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That's a feature of most zsh/fish customisations nowadays, including ohmyzsh.

So what seems like an innovation is in many cases just the standard. :shocked:

Checked - they,re literally a bunch of png's. No wonder the repo is so huge.

image