Very cool, I was thinking of the same functionality just yesterday.

I've a question though, what will happen if Neovide and background images sizes are different? For example:

• Background image will be stretched
• Background image will be padded

etc.

I wonder that If I make Neovide fullscreen and pass a background image sharing the same screen resolution, no image stretches / paddings will occur? That would be the "ideal" case.

Thank you!

Thank you for the review @MultisampledNight! Sorry for the wait I just noticed that there is some activity on this pr. I merged latest changes and implimented your suggestions.

Very cool, I was thinking of the same functionality just yesterday.

I've a question though, what will happen if Neovide and background images sizes are different? For example:

• Background image will be stretched
• Background image will be padded

etc.

Before it was stretching however in latest commit I made it to keep aspect ratio, fill the screen and center the image and crop the longest side in case if it overflows as suggested here

I wonder that If I make Neovide fullscreen and pass a background image sharing the same screen resolution, no image stretches / paddings will occur? That would be the "ideal" case.

Yes it would fill the screen without any stretching and padding

(fwiw I am not familiar enough with the neovide codebase anymore to qualitatively review this PR anymore, sorry)

Is there a way to test the artifact without building from sources?

@pidgeon777, I started the CI run, the artifacts should be there once it finishes

Test Results

  6 files  ±0    6 suites  ±0   21s ⏱️ +3s
110 tests ±0  110 ✅ ±0  0 💤 ±0  0 ❌ ±0 
644 runs  ±0  644 ✅ ±0  0 💤 ±0  0 ❌ ±0 

Results for commit b6bfaa9. ± Comparison against base commit 35ea46a.

♻️ This comment has been updated with latest results.

@pidgeon777, the artifacts are a bit hard to find currently, we need to improve or at least document it, but you should be able to find them here

I just did a quick test with these settings:

  vim.g.neovide_transparency = 0.8
  -- vim.g.neovide_transparency = 1.0
  vim.g.neovide_background_image = "C:\\Users\\<NAME>\\Downloads\\pexels-photo-1483054.jpeg"

Background image is now shown but it makes Neovide extremely laggy, even with simple cursor movements in normal mode.

Image resolution is 8192 x 5063, 72 DPI, 24 bit

When utilizing an image with a resolution of 1920x1080 as a background, the performance and smoothness of Neovide appear to remain unaffected (but more tests should be done).

I would like to inquire about the configuration settings of Neovide, specifically pertaining to the transparency of the background image. Could you provide guidance on how to adjust these settings so that:

• When the transparency is set to 0, the background image is entirely obscured, and only the Neovim background color is visible.

Example:

• Conversely, when the transparency is set to 1, the background image is fully displayed without any overlay of the Neovim background color:

To achieve the above image, I simply moved the Neovide window on the top of a Chrome background image.

But it would be great to obtain the second setup by setting the path to the background image in Neovide, and toggle between the amount of image and the neovide background, with the transparency option.

The aforementioned test was conducted using the artifact linked below. This version of the software did not yet include the background image feature. However, it did allow for the adjustment of the Neovide background transparency:

Artifact Link

But it would be great to obtain the second setup by setting the path to the background image in Neovide, and toggle between the amount of image and the neovide background, with the transparency option.

You can do it with neovide_background_transparency option, it controls how transparent is build-in neovide background color. neovide_transparency controls how transparent is the whole window.

This is also probably why you can't see the background image. Try setting neovide_background_transparency to lower values like 0.5 to have a mix between a neovide's background color and image.

Background image is now shown but it makes Neovide extremely laggy, even with simple cursor movements in normal mode.

I tried with 8k image but unfortunatly I wasn't able to reproduce it. Could you send your image that you are testing?

You're right, I didn't know about this new neovide_background_transparency option.

Below the background image causing the lag:

UPDATE: I also zipped it:

pexels-photo-1483054.zip

I have conducted some tests using the artifacts available at Neovide Actions Run. I collected some observations regarding it:

1. Background Image Stretching: The background image appears to stretch when the Neovide window is resized.

2. Background Image Replication: The background image is replicated for each window (including Trouble, window split, etc.). This could lead to a cluttered appearance, particularly when multiple windows are open.

Given these observations, I have a couple of suggestions for potential improvements:

For Issue 1 (Background Image Stretching):

• Investigate the possibility of maintaining the aspect ratio of the background image during window resizing. This could prevent distortion and ensure the image remains visually appealing regardless of window size. For example, by adding some padding. It would be nice to leave this strech feature enabled by specifying a configuration option.

For Issue 2 (Background Image Replication):

• Consider allowing users to assign a unique background image to each window. This could enhance customization and allow users to differentiate between windows more easily. It seems to be something technically doable, given that the background image is currently replicated for each window.

• Alternatively, consider assigning a single background image to the Neovide background only, regardless of the number of open splits. This would prevent the replication of the background image for each window split, which currently occurs.

• Consider allowing users to assign a unique background image to each window. This could enhance customization and allow users to differentiate between windows more easily. It seems to be something technically doable, given that the background image is currently replicated for each window.

I think this is quite hard currently. We don't have any support for window specific options in Neovide. And the Neovim gui protocol does not really support it easily either, which means that if we use the Neovim api to do it, things could get out of sync.

It's something that we want to add support for in the future though, for example, we should be able to control the shadows, and blur effects per window.

Understand, so for now a simple "hack" to achieve the same effect could be just set vim.g.neovide_background_transparency to a value and put a static background under the Neovide window

I was able to optimize it to render for less than 1ms for 10k image while text editing. However it still can go up to 15ms when resizing windows but it doesn't really feel that laggy. To further optimize I can probably prescale image to maximum monitor size but it would involve a lot of platform specific code and I don't think it really worth it.

I have a question regarding the changes made in the previous commit. Previously, we had the capability to load high-resolution images, but this process was time-consuming and resulted in significant lag in Neovide.

With the new implementation, my understanding is that the image loading time has been reduced. However, I'm curious about the impact on Neovide's performance. Will it still be influenced by the size of the image, albeit to a lesser extent than before?

To put it more succinctly, if we load a high-resolution image as a background and do not resize the Neovide window, will the overall performance, such as cursor movement and scrolling, remain the same as if no background image was loaded at all? Or rather, would loading a 10K image as a background result in the same performance as loading a 2K image?

Will it still be influenced by the size of the image, albeit to a lesser extent than before?

Yes, but only when resizing windows

will the overall performance, such as cursor movement and scrolling, remain the same as if no background image was loaded at all?

Yes, it would be similar

Or rather, would loading a 10K image as a background result in the same performance as loading a 2K image?

Yes, performace would be very simular unless resizing

So basicaly previous bottlenect was in image rescaling. Before I would scale a 10k image to much smaller resolution of a window each frame which take significan amount of time. However with the latest changes I cache the resized image and until the window size doesn't change it will just render cached image without any significan performace impact.

is there a way for this to tile lets say i have a small pattern image 250x250 pixels or will all images always be centered with no repeat ?

There's one more thing that I noticed.

There's some strange interaction between neovide_transparency and neovide_background_transparency. Even without a background image the neovide_background_transparency affects how transparent the window is.

I suggest that we use one of these three alternatives, I'm not really sure which one is the best

1. Make a breaking change so that neovide_transparency affects everything else, but not the final window transparency. And the neovide_background_transparency controls that. With both set to opaque, then the background image replaces the Neovide default background on the root window, but fully opaque.
2. Change neovide_background_transparency to neovide_background_image_transparency, and let it control only the background image. Otherwise, it works like 1.
3. Let neovide_transparency control all the transparency. I think even in this case I would prefer that the background image is always visible when set and replaces the default background on root windows.

is there a way for this to tile lets say i have a small pattern image 250x250 pixels or will all images always be centered with no repeat ?

No, unfortunately its not possible at the moment

Make a breaking change so that neovide_transparency affects everything else, but not the final window transparency. And the neovide_background_transparency controls that. With both set to opaque, then the background image replaces the Neovide default background on the root window, but fully opaque.

Initially I wanted to do it like this but then decided on the current aproach to not break backwards compatibility

Change neovide_background_transparency to neovide_background_image_transparency, and let it control only the background image. Otherwise, it works like 1.

Currently it is potentially possible to control three different transparencies: window, image and color. Right now neovide_transparency changes all three of them and neovide_background_transparency adds more transparancy to color. Also neovide_background_transparency in current implimentation is also affecting the window transparancy which I am sure how to fix.

The rendering is happening in the same order: window, image, color. So option that is changing only image transparancy wouldn't make much sense as the image would only be visible if neovide_transparency is less than 1 and less visible with the new setting. However I can change the render order and render image on top of color background and then it would make more sense to introduce this option.

Let neovide_transparency control all the transparency. I think even in this case I would prefer that the background image is always visible when set and replaces the default background on root windows.

But in this case it is not possible to control the brightness of the image

I think the second option is the most optimal one. I will try to change render order and add setting to change image transparancy

Any updates on this? Would love to see this feature.

Any updates on this? Would love to see this feature.

I agree, I tested that feature some time ago and it worked really good. I hope it will be merged.

We are still waiting for this to be implemented

I think the second option is the most optimal one. I will try to change render order and add setting to change image transparancy

It can't be merged the way it currently works:

There's some strange interaction between neovide_transparency and neovide_background_transparency. Even without a background image the neovide_background_transparency affects how transparent the window is.

But actually, since we are going to do breaking changes to the transparency settings. I think I would actually prefer option 1. of my suggestion, as it gives more control, even without a background image. I don't think this would conflict my suggestions here, it just gives a quick configuration option if you just want to have a transparent background.

I would also love this feature!

(proud daily user of neovide ❤️)

It isn't working for me. Is it because I run the flatpak version?

@VortexViking, it hasn't been merged yet, because it's not ready. I don't remember exactly how, but it breaks the default transparency settings.

@mysty0, now when thinking about it, I previously suggested this

Make a breaking change so that neovide_transparency affects everything else, but not the final window transparency. And the neovide_background_transparency controls that. With both set to opaque, then the background image replaces the Neovide default background on the root window, but fully opaque.

But now when thinking about it, it does not need to be a breaking change

1. If no background image is set, neovide_transparency and neovide_normal_opacity works like before
2. If a background image is set, neovide_transparency works like before, but there's an opaque background image below instead of the desktop. neovide_background_transparency (or rather, let's name it as neovide_background_opacity) controls how transparent the image itself is and how much of the desktop you see through. I suspect in most cases,users want to leave it at the default fully opaque value, to avoid seeing two images on top of each other.
3. neovide_normal_opacity also works as before, so if you want to replace all the Normal highlights with the background image you could set that to 0.

Any updates on this, and anyway we can help, atleast others because i do not know Rust (yet) sadly :o

Any updates on this, and anyway we can help, at least others because i do not know Rust (yet) sadly :o

@vipexv
Why not have an AI do it LOL.

I can't tell if that's sarcasm 😔

I can't tell if that's sarcasm 😔

It is. It would not go well having chatgpt data mine our codebase.

when is this going to be merged

when is this going to be merged

When it works without breaking regular transparency settings. Sadly @mysty0, seems to have stopped working on it, so someone else probably need to step up.

when is this going to be merged

When it works without breaking regular transparency settings. Sadly @mysty0, seems to have stopped working on it, so someone else probably need to step up.

What about you? You seem like a good guy to continue this.

I think that the generic image support here could cover this use case as well

• feat: image rendering support #3039

So, we don't necessarily need specialized background image support, when that's ready. I think the negative z index support of the Kitty protocol could cover the use case https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/. For the official Neovim protocol, something better could be implemented that is aware the Neovim z-indices.