new! : You'll now also find tryone's dual_kawase blur for the new backend, as well as rounded corners from sdhand if they are so desired, merged from ibhagwan.
This is a forked version from Sandmark's picom branch, including Blackcapcoder's animation code inside. The animations here are further smoothed and time deltas reduced from 1ms to 40us for high refresh rates and buttery smooth transitions.
You'll need to run it with the experimental backend with:
picom --experimental-backend
Your picom config can also now take advantage of some of the options that were previously implemented in blackcapcoder's compton version:
transition-length
length of animation in milliseconds (default: 300)transition-pow-x
animation easing on the x-axis (default: 0.1)transition-pow-y
animation easing on the y-axis (default: 0.1)transition-pow-w
animation easing on the window width (default: 0.1)transition-pow-h
animation easing on the window height (default: 0.1)size-transition
whether to animate window size changes (default: true)spawn-center-screen
whether to animate new windows from the center of the screen (default: false)spawn-center
whether to animate new windows from their own center (default: true)no-scale-down
Whether to animate down scaling (some programs handle this poorly) (default: false)AUR package
OR
git clone https://github.com/jonaburg/picom
cd picom
meson --buildtype=release . build
ninja -C build
# To install the binaries in /usr/local/bin (optional)
sudo ninja -C build install
This is a development branch, bugs to be expected
This is forked from the original Compton because it seems to have become unmaintained.
The current battle plan of this fork is to refactor it to make the code possible to maintain, so potential contributors won't be scared away when they take a look at the code.
We also try to fix bugs.
The original README can be found here
--experimental-backends
This flag enables the refactored/partially rewritten backends.
Currently, new backends feature better vsync with the xrender backend and improved input lag with the glx backend (for non-NVIDIA users). The performance should be on par with the old backends.
New backend features will only be implemented on the new backends from now on, and the old backends will eventually be phased out after the new backends stabilize.
To test the new backends, add the --experimental-backends
flag to the command you use to run picom. This flag is not available from the configuration file.
To report issues with the new backends, please state explicitly you are using the new backends in your report.
Since the inception of this fork, the existence of two compton repositories has caused some number of confusions. Mainly, people will report issues of this fork to the original compton, or report issues of the original compton here. Later, when distros started packaging this fork of compton, some wanted to differentiate the newer compton from the older version. They found themselves having no choice but to invent a name for this fork. This is less than ideal since this has the potential to cause more confusions among users.
Therefore, we decided to move this fork to a new name. Personally, I consider this more than justified since this version of compton has gone through significant changes since it was forked.
The criteria for a good name were
Of course, choosing a name is never easy, and there is no apparent way to objectively evaluate the names. Yet, we have to solve the aforementioned problems as soon as possible.
In the end, we picked picom
(a portmanteau of pico
and composite
) as our new name. This name might not be perfect, but is what we will move forward with unless there's a compelling reason not to.
Following the deprecation process, migration to the new name will be broken into 3 steps:
compton
will be updated to picom
in the code base. compton
will still be installed, but only as a symlink to picom
. When picom
is launched via the symlink, a warning message is printed, alerting the user to migrate. Similarly, the old configuration file names and dbus interface names will still be accepted but warned.picom
will not start when launched via the symlink.The dbus interface and service names are unchanged, so no migration needed for that.
See Releases
Assuming you already have all the usual building tools installed (e.g. gcc, python, meson, ninja, etc.), you still need:
-Ddbus=false
meson configure flag)-Dconfig_file=false
meson configure flag)-Dopengl=false
meson configure flag)-Dregex=false
meson configure flag)On Debian based distributions (e.g. Ubuntu), the list of needed packages are
libxext-dev libxcb1-dev libxcb-damage0-dev libxcb-xfixes0-dev libxcb-shape0-dev libxcb-render-util0-dev libxcb-render0-dev libxcb-randr0-dev libxcb-composite0-dev libxcb-image0-dev libxcb-present-dev libxcb-xinerama0-dev libxcb-glx0-dev libpixman-1-dev libdbus-1-dev libconfig-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libpcre2-dev libevdev-dev uthash-dev libev-dev libx11-xcb-dev
To build the documents, you need asciidoc
$ git submodule update --init --recursive
$ meson --buildtype=release . build
$ ninja -C build
Built binary can be found in build/src
If you have libraries and/or headers installed at non-default location (e.g. under /usr/local/
), you might need to tell meson about them, since meson doesn't look for dependencies there by default.
You can do that by setting the CPPFLAGS
and LDFLAGS
environment variables when running meson
. Like this:
$ LDFLAGS="-L/path/to/libraries" CPPFLAGS="-I/path/to/headers" meson --buildtype=release . build
As an example, on FreeBSD, you might have to run meson with:
$ LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/include" CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include" meson --buildtype=release . build
$ ninja -C build
$ ninja -C build install
Default install prefix is /usr/local
, you can change it with meson configure -Dprefix=<path> build
You can look at the Projects page, and see if there is anything that interests you. Or you can take a look at the Issues.
Even if you don't want to contribute code, you can still contribute by compiling and running this branch, and report any issue you can find.
Contributions to the documents and wiki will also be appreciated.
See CONTRIBUTORS