TITLE: Tiling wallpapers
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 which uses a retro 
looking XFCE window manager setup. It almost looks more like FVWM.

  [this post on reddit]: 
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:

-   Index of /~duncjo01/archive/patterns
-   dkeg/bitmap-walls: Collection of tiled bitmap walls for xsetroot
-   BenjaminHCCarr/PropagandaTiles

  [Index of /~duncjo01/archive/patterns]: 
http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/archive/patterns/
  [dkeg/bitmap-walls: Collection of tiled bitmap walls for 
xsetroot]: https://github.com/dkeg/bitmap-walls
  [BenjaminHCCarr/PropagandaTiles]: 
https://github.com/BenjaminHCCarr/PropagandaTiles

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:

  ![Blue 
rivets](https://johngodlee.xyz/img_full/tiling/blue_rivet.png)

  ![Cyan diagonal 
tiles](https://johngodlee.xyz/img_full/tiling/cyan_diag_tile.png)

  ![Forest](https://johngodlee.xyz/img_full/tiling/forest.png)

  ![Blue wave](https://johngodlee.xyz/img_full/tiling/blue_wave.png)

  ![Weave](https://johngodlee.xyz/img_full/tiling/weave.png)

  ![Grey tile](https://johngodlee.xyz/img_full/tiling/grey_tile.png)

  ![Narrow cyan diagonal 
lines](https://johngodlee.xyz/img_full/tiling/narrow_cyan_diag.png)

  ![Wide cyan diagonal 
tiles](https://johngodlee.xyz/img_full/tiling/wide_cyan_diag.png)

  ![Negative grey 
box](https://johngodlee.xyz/img_full/tiling/neg_grey_box.png)

  ![Small cyan 
tile](https://johngodlee.xyz/img_full/tiling/small_cyan_tile.png)

  ![Medium cyan 
tile](https://johngodlee.xyz/img_full/tiling/mid_cyan_tile.png)

  ![Large cyan 
tile](https://johngodlee.xyz/img_full/tiling/large_cyan_tile.png)

  ![Blue tile](https://johngodlee.xyz/img_full/tiling/blue_tile.png)

  ![Purple 
wave](https://johngodlee.xyz/img_full/tiling/purple_wave.png)

  ![Purple 
texture](https://johngodlee.xyz/img_full/tiling/purple.png)

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.

  [can be found here](https://johngodlee.xyz/files/tiling/tiles.zip)