webscreensaver

A screen hack which uses WebKit and works with XScreensaver or XFCE.

NOTE: If you are using Wayland this is unlikely to work. Wayland does not support XScreensaver.

GNOME Users: There have been reports of this not working with Gnome.

Dependencies

Python 3
xscreensaver or xfce4-screensaver
GTK3
WebKit2 gtk

On Debian/Ubuntu, try this command:

    sudo apt install python3 python3-gi gir1.2-webkit2-4.1 gir1.2-gtk-3.0

Install (XScreensaver)

Copy webscreensaver into /usr/libexec/xscreensaver (or /usr/lib/screensaver on some systems) and then edit ~/.xscreensaver:

    programs:
                  webscreensaver                  \n\

If you wish to set the url:

    -url <url_to_the_page_you_want>

Otherwise it will choose a random one.

You can persist cookies by specifying a cookie file:

    -cookie-file <path_to_cookie_file>

NOTE: All parameters should be all on the same line as webscreensaver

Install (XFCE)

Copy webscreensaver into /usr/lib/xscreensaver.
Copy webscreensaver.desktop into /usr/share/applications/screensavers.

Sites List

The list of sites chosen can be customised via a configuration file (TOML).

The format of the file is series of sections (one per site) as follows:

    [thisisasite]
    url = "http://abcd.efg"
    inject_css = "body { color: black }"
    remove_tags = ["header", "hullo"]
    remove_ids = ["hellohello", "heyhey"]

The inject_css, remove_tags and remove_ids keys are used to apply customisations to the page after it has loaded. The value can be either a single string or a list of strings.

inject_css - the CSS string will be injected into the page.
remove_tags - all tags matching the specified tag name will be removed.
remove_ids - all tags with the specified IDs will be removed.

Cycling

If you set your screensaver settings to "cycle", you should use -cycle which will pick the next screensaver in the list each time WebScreensaver is run. (Cycling is implemented in XScreensaver by stopping the current screensaver program and starting another one -- even in the case of a single screensaver being selected.)

3rd Party Packages

You can install webscreensaver easily using these packages (unsupported):

Arch Linux (AUR) - webscreensaver-git - https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/webscreensaver-git