Liberty Hill Studios — Desktop Theme

The studio's signature Texas Hill Country dusk, living on your desktop. A fully animated wallpaper that follows the real sun and the real moon — golden afternoon → signature dusk → near-black starry night with fireflies and the Milky Way → rose dawn — plus a complete Windows brand kit: transparent taskbar, dark + gold accent theme, terminal colors, notification chimes, icons, and an optional keyboard-driven search/navigation stack.

Dusk	Night	Day

Quick install

git clone https://github.com/trimmdev/lhs-desktop-theme
cd lhs-desktop-theme
.\install.ps1              # wallpaper + taskbar + theme + terminal + chimes (opt-in)
.\install.ps1 -AutoAdjust  # ...and keep the wallpaper fitted as monitors change
.\install.ps1 -NavStack    # ...plus Everything, PowerToys FancyZones, Flow Launcher

On a Mac

There is a macOS port in macos/ — the same wallpaper file, so the sun and the moon behave identically. It is wallpaper-first: the default install changes exactly one thing, the desktop picture. Terminal schemes, launcher themes, the gold accent and the studio icon are each behind their own opt-in flag.

cd macos
./install.sh --dry-run       # prints every action, changes nothing — start here
./install.sh
./install.sh --auto-adjust   # ...and keep it fitted as displays change

Optional extras: macos/screensaver/ runs the same living scene as the screen saver, so an idle or locked Mac shows the animated dusk.

The macOS side was written without a Mac to test on. The wallpaper itself is a self-contained web page and is genuinely cross-platform; anything that touches system settings is best-effort and is documented as such. Run --dry-run first.

Everything is user-level and reversible. One or two UAC prompts may appear for app installers. See the end-of-install output for the three optional manual finishing touches (avatar, gold pointer, lock screen).

The field guide

An animated walkthrough of every feature and shortcut lives at docs/guide.html — open it in any browser after cloning.

What's inside

• macos/ — the macOS port. Shares this exact wallpaper file rather than copying it, so the two platforms cannot drift. Wallpaper-first installer, per-display exact fitting and a display watcher (macos/tools/), Liberty Hill Dusk schemes for six terminal emulators, Raycast + Alfred themes, an .icns, and an optional animated screen saver. See macos/README.md.
• wallpaper/lhs-dusk.html — the living wallpaper. Self-contained single file (Sora font embedded, zero network calls). Canvas-rendered at native resolution on any monitor: noise-generated ridgelines, dithered sky gradient, aerially-shaded hills, backlit cloud decks, god-rays, drifting valley mist, rising embers that become fireflies at night, a dense star field + Milky Way + shooting stars, film grain, and the Lone Star + wordmark lockup. 30fps capped, ~0.2% of one CPU core per monitor (measured), auto-pauses under fullscreen apps (via Lively).
• stills/ — pixel-perfect PNG renders covering every standard aspect family (16:9 1280×720 → 8K, 16:10, 4:3, 5:4, 3:2, 21:9 and 32:9 ultrawides, 5K, portrait)
  • dawn/day/night variants at common sizes. Use as static wallpapers or lock screens. These are the offline fallback ladder — see Fits any monitor, which renders exact matches for resolutions that aren't in the ladder at all.
• tools/ — the resolution machinery: Set-LhsWallpaper.ps1 (fit the scene to the attached monitors), Watch-LhsDisplays.ps1 + Register-LhsDisplayWatcher.ps1 (react to layout changes), LhsRender.psm1 (render a still at any size with no dependencies), LhsDisplay.psm1 (physical-pixel monitor enumeration), and standard-resolutions.json (the shared catalog).
• terminal/liberty-hill-dusk.json — Windows Terminal scheme (ink background, parchment text, gold cursor, ember/verdant/sky/plum ANSI ramp).
• flow-launcher/Liberty Hill Dusk.xaml — Flow Launcher theme (translucent ink glass, gold caret + selection).
• fancyzones/ — PowerToys FancyZones config: gold snap highlights + three studio layouts (LHS Ultrawide 30-40-30, LHS Quad, LHS Halves).
• icons/ — multi-size lhs.ico (Lone Star mark), account avatar, OEM logo.
• sounds/ — two short studio chimes (finish + attention), wired to the Windows sound events SystemAsterisk, SystemExclamation, and Notification.Default.

Fits any monitor, automatically

The wallpaper is a canvas scene, not a photograph, so there is no reason to ever show you a stretched one. Every monitor gets a still rendered at its own native resolution — including resolutions nobody has ever pre-baked. Both platforms, with the same guarantee and no shared limitation.

# Windows
.\install.ps1 -AutoAdjust                    # install + watch for changes
.\tools\Set-LhsWallpaper.ps1                 # re-fit right now
.\tools\Set-LhsWallpaper.ps1 -Mood night     # ...in a different mood
.\tools\Register-LhsDisplayWatcher.ps1 -Remove   # stop watching

# macOS — see macos/README.md for the detail
./install.sh --auto-adjust
./tools/lhs-fit-wallpaper.sh
./tools/install-display-watcher.sh --remove

	Windows	macOS
Exact native render per monitor	✅	✅
Renders resolutions never pre-baked	✅	✅
Re-fits on resolution / hotplug change	✅ logon task	✅ LaunchAgent
Renderer dependency	Edge (ships with Windows)	/usr/bin/perl + any Chromium-family browser
Multi-monitor method	one span bitmap at physical origins	per-display (setDesktopImageURL:forScreen:)
No-browser fallback	aspect-scored cover-crop	aspect-scored shipped still

What the watcher reacts to. Change a resolution, rotate a screen, plug in a projector, dock or undock a laptop, or swap monitors entirely — the wallpaper is rebuilt for the new layout within a few seconds. It runs as a hidden per-user logon task (Liberty Hill Display Watcher), logging to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Liberty Hill Studios\display-watcher.log.

How a new resolution gets a wallpaper. Cache → shipped stills/ ladder → render it natively → (only if the machine has no Chromium-family browser at all) cover-crop the nearest shipped still. The renderer drives Edge — which ships with Windows — over the DevTools Protocol, so no node, npm or Playwright is required on the target machine. A fresh 4K bake takes about three seconds and is cached forever after. macOS does the same thing through macos/tools/lhs-render-still.pl, using only /usr/bin/perl and core modules.

The one-shot msedge --headless --screenshot switch is not used, and can't be: it fires at the load event, before the scene has painted a frame, and reliably produces a black PNG. The scene raises window.__ready once its deterministic frame is on the canvas, and the renderer waits for that.

Multi-monitor. Each monitor gets its own complete composition — its own sun, its own lockup — and they are composed into one span image laid out at the monitors' real physical origins, negative ones included. Mixed resolutions, mixed refresh rates and mixed DPI all work; monitors are enumerated in physical pixels via EnumDisplaySettings, because Screen.AllScreens reports logical ones and would quietly bake a 2560×1440 still for a 4K panel running at 150%.

The static image tracks the real sun too. -Mood auto (the default) asks the scene what the sky is doing right now and bakes that. This matters because the static image is what you actually see whenever the living wallpaper isn't drawing — Lively pauses under fullscreen apps, and it hasn't started yet at logon. Before this, that fallback was frozen at dusk forever, so a midday game session dropped you onto a sunset. The mood comes from the page's own solarAltitude() / moodWeights() over CDP; the solar maths is deliberately not reimplemented in PowerShell, because a second copy would drift from the verified one. The watcher re-checks every 20 minutes, and a check that finds nothing new writes nothing. Pin it with -Mood dusk (or dawn/day/night) if you'd rather it never moved.

Pre-baking (optional). install.ps1 -PreRenderStandard, or .\tools\Set-LhsWallpaper.ps1 -PreRender standard, renders every resolution in tools/standard-resolutions.json into the local cache so even the first paint on a brand-new monitor is instant. It is not required — the watcher renders on demand.

To regenerate the committed ladder after changing the scene: node tools/bake-stills.mjs --shipped (or --all, or 3440x1440 --moods dusk,dawn).

The sky is computed, not faked

The scene doesn't just interpolate between times of day — it solves for where the sun and moon actually are.

• Sun — altitude from the USNO/NOAA low-precision solar equations. Sunrise, golden hour, civil twilight and night follow the true sun for the date, so they drift with the seasons instead of firing at hardcoded clock times. The disc is clipped to the sky, so the ridge genuinely occludes it as it rises and sets.
• Moon — position and phase from abridged lunar theory (Meeus ch. 47, with the evection, variation and annual-equation terms). Verified at 0.38 minutes of error per lunation across 618 lunations / 50 years. The terminator is a real projected ellipse, the unlit limb carries earthshine, the maria rotate with the parallactic angle, and the disc grows and shrinks with true perigee/apogee distance.
• Sunrise ≠ sunset — dawn gets its own cooler, rosier palette. Overnight the air settles, so morning runs violet → rose → peach where evening runs ember.
• Late-hour comfort — after ~22:30 the finished frame is eased down and warmed, deepest through the small hours, lifting before dawn.

Set your own location — the site is a single constant near the top of wallpaper/lhs-dusk.html:

const SITE = { lat: 30.6624, lon: -97.9247, name: "Liberty Hill, Texas" };

One deliberate stylization: the sun is pinned to the centre of the frame rather than placed at its true azimuth, because the composition nests it in a dip baked into the far ridge, under the wordmark. The moon does use its true azimuth. So each body's own position is real, but the on-screen distance between them is not — at a first quarter they are 97° apart in the real sky while appearing close together here.

URL parameters

Param	Effect
?mood=day|dusk|dawn|night	Pin a mood instead of following the real sun
?at=2026-07-21T21:30	Run the scene at another moment (local time)
?at=+9 / ?at=-3.5	...or a signed hour offset from now
?speed=1440	Run the clock N× faster — 1440 puts a full day in one minute, with a time/sun/moon readout
?still=1	One deterministic frame, for baking PNGs

Design law

Gold #E8A13A is an accent, never a background: cursors, highlights, selection, icons — small elements only. Surfaces stay translucent ink (#0A0807). Standard system affordances (drive icons, capacity bars) are never reskinned.

The stack it rides on

Lively Wallpaper · TranslucentTB · PowerToys · Everything · Flow Launcher — all free, all excellent. Wordmark font: Sora (SIL Open Font License), embedded as base64.

Palette

Token	Hex		Token	Hex
ink-950	#0a0807		gold-400	#e8a13a
parchment	#f5ecd9		gold-300	#ecbe5b
ember-400	#d4542b		gold-600	#b3661f

Mirrors liberty-hill-studios/src/lib/palette.ts — change them together or the dusk drifts from the site.

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