ASCII Art Wallpaper

Generate ASCII art wallpapers from masterpieces of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Features

• Search Artworks — Browse and search the Met Museum collection, then generate an ASCII wallpaper from any artwork.
• Auto ASCII Wallpaper — Configure settings and apply a random ASCII wallpaper instantly.
• Background Rotation — Automatically changes your wallpaper every hour with a new random artwork.

How It Works

The extension fetches artwork images from the Met Museum's public API, converts them to ASCII characters using brightness mapping, and renders the result as a full-screen wallpaper image using macOS native text rendering (via sips and a compiled Swift renderer).

Requirements

• macOS (uses sips and osascript which are built-in on macOS)
• The Swift compiler (swiftc) must be available — included with Xcode or Xcode Command Line Tools

Settings

Setting	Description
Color Mode	Monochrome or original artwork colors
Background	Wallpaper background color
Text Color	ASCII character color (monochrome mode)
Density	Number of characters per row (100–400)

The wallpaper is rendered at 3840x2160 (4K) resolution by default.

When you open Search Artworks, the wallpaper form waits for the artwork image to load before allowing submission, so wallpaper generation only starts once the selected artwork is ready.