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DATE: 2020-12-10
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
I've recently become enamoured with tiling desktop wallpapers. These are wallpapers where the image is repeated across the screen in a regular grid to produce the illusion of a continuous texture. Tiling wallpapers used to be a necessity when hard drive space and memory were limited. Now they're more of a curiosity and source of nostalgia. One benefit of tiling wallpapers is that I can store them in my dotfiles repo and the repo will still stay small, while some other wallpapers I have can be up to 50MB.
I was initially inspired by this post on reddit[1] which uses a retro looking XFCE window manager setup. It almost looks more like FVWM.
1: https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/7ivelb/xfce_got_obsessed_with_tiling_wallpapers/
I scoured a few different sources for my favourite tiling wallpapers. Here are a few places where there are a bunch of tiling wallpapers:
I wanted to showcase a few of my favourite tiling wallpapers, which can be seen below. The way this website renders dithered images will probably make some of the screenshots look terrible at this resolution, so click the images to see them full size. All the images below were captured wit hthe same pixel dimensions by the way, and so are directly comparable:
2: http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/archive/patterns/
3: https://github.com/dkeg/bitmap-walls
4: https://github.com/BenjaminHCCarr/PropagandaTiles
Just to prove how tiny the files are, here is a breakdown of their file sizes. Also, I've been learning AWK:
du -b * |\
awk '
BEGIN {printf("%20s %5s\n", "file", "bytes")}
{printf("%20s %5s\n", $2, $1)}' |\
sort -nk2
file bytes
small_cyan_tile.gif 69
mid_cyan_tile.gif 107
neg_grey_box.gif 127
blue_wave.gif 140
large_cyan_tile.gif 170
purple_wave.gif 177
narrow_cyan_diag.png 195
wide_cyan_diag.png 265
forest.png 325
blue_tile.png 373
weave.png 419
cyan_diag_tile.png 609
blue_rivet.bmp 630
grey_tile.bmp 1270
purple.png 2297
The files for each of the wallpapers seen above can be found here[5].