I don't run a desktop environment, but instead use a bare window manager (StumpWM). Thus, my usual method for setting a desktop background is to run display -window root <image file> from a WM startup script, which does what I want.When using multiple monitors, the X root window stretches across both and includes dead space. Thus, running that command line causes the image to either be stretched or tiled across the entire window, which isn't useful. I can use -geometry to display an image on either monitor, but if I run that again (to view on both monitors) it overwrites the other. There doesn't seem to be any ability with display to display two images in one invocation.How can I use display to display different images on both monitors? Alternatively, how else can I get the desktop background image effect without a desktop environment?
Multiple images on root window with ImageMagick
xorg;imagemagick
You could use montage to generate a single image that encompasses your whole display, and call display -window root on the resulting image.Alternatively, you can use xloadimage which is happy to tile multiple images. It doesn't know about separate monitors, so if your images aren't full-screen or if you have different-size monitors, you may need to use -at or -geometry to adjust the image positions manually.xloadimage -onroot -at 1680,0 image1.jpg -at 0,0 image2.png