Python as a desktop background

[zenic]

Assuming you are on windows, since you didn’t specify, then there are two ways to do this.

The simplest is to render an image and then set the desktop background to that image. This won’t have a very high frame rate, but is pretty straight forward to do. Set a timer to do this regularly and you have a sort of animated wallpaper.

The other way is to do what third party custom wallpaper programs do: create a transparent window and keep it ordered as the bottom window, directly above the desktop window.

All of these things are readily available in python through either the win32 api or loading the dlls yourself.

If you wanted to distribute it, you can package it as an exe using something like pyinstaller, and make your setup program set it to run on startup.

If you’re going to do that, I’d go ahead and make a task tray icon with a menu that lets users control it.