Organization/Searching/Sorting Hidamari Video Folder

[shawn-peery]

Hello All!

I'm excited to potentially start contributing to this project! Reason being I was very much used to use Wallpaper Engine on Steam on my Windows computer and I decided to swap over to Ubuntu for various reasons. And I love that there's already a very stable very easy to use application like HIdamari that gives me the basic functionality of Wallpaper Engine while also being completely free.

The first thing I notice in comparison to WallPaper Engine and Hidamari is that you can make folders and subfolders in wallpaper engine, sort and search by a term, make a playlist and make a hotkey that plays the playlist. While I'd love to have all of those features in Hidamari I am unaware of any technical restrictions in place that would hinder development on these features.

So I'm mostly asking if the following could done:

Create folders/Sub Folders Virtually through the App. (No Folders on the file system but the app organizes it in folders internally).

OR

Make is to that if you have folders and sub folders inside of your Hidamari video folder, then it will show those folders and sub folders on the Hidamari file explorer.

I may work on this feature myself but I'm wanting to know if there's some technical limit that prevents this from happening.

Gratefully,

[jeffshee]

Hi @shawn-peery, thank you for expressing interest in contributing to this project!

I'm the only developer for this project, and while my interest and time have shifted to Hanabi Extension (another live wallpaper solution for Gnome Shell), we currently lack developers to work on new ideas and innovations. We need your help if you will~

So I'm mostly asking if the following could done:

Create folders/Sub Folders Virtually through the App. (No Folders on the file system but the app organizes it in folders internally).

OR

Make is to that if you have folders and sub folders inside of your Hidamari video folder, then it will show those folders and sub folders on the Hidamari file explorer.

I may work on this feature myself but I'm wanting to know if there's some technical limit that prevents this from happening.

There isn't any technical limit that prevents this from happening. The latter should be easier to implement because it doesn't need logic to store/manage the file structure. However the former gives more flexibility to implement a playlist, in which the files can be sorted in any order. Both are reasonable choices depending on what kind of UI/UX you try to achieve here.

If you need my assistance, don't hesitate to ask (I'm quite active on Discord, as well) 😄

[shawn-peery]

@jeffshee

Thank you very much for that information! I've dealt with Python a bit but switching over to Ubuntu I want an experience like WallPaper engine and I find this program very easy to use and reliable so I may end up learning more about python to help contribute! Thanks for making an amazing project!

Also if you don't mind could you explain the high level differences between this project and Hanabi Extension?

Gratefully,
Shawn Peery

[jeffshee]

@shawn-peery

Thank you for your interest in the project and your kind words about Hidamari!

Hidamari and Hanabi are both my projects, with the main difference being their implementation: Hidamari is an X11 desktop app, while Hanabi is a GNOME Shell Extension.

In short, if you're using GNOME, Hanabi is the recommended choice, while Hidamari is suitable for non-GNOME environments.

Hidamari displays live wallpapers by launching a window with a _NET_WM_DESKTOP property, but it can be inconsistent in GNOME and faces challenges with Wayland support.

Hanabi offers better integration with GNOME Shell and doesn't suffer from Hidamari's technical limitations. However, it requires more expertise to develop and may encounter compatibility issues with new GNOME Shell releases.

If you have any further questions, feel free to ask!

[shawn-peery]

@jeffshee

Ah thank you for that information!

I will likely try out the Hanabi since I'm using ubuntu but I might come back to this project to help out as well!