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.

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:

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 .

Tiling wallpapers

2020-12-10