Compton

Compton is a compositor for X, and a fork of xcompmgr-dana.

I was frustrated by the low amount of standalone lightweight compositors. Compton was forked from Dana Jansens' fork of xcompmgr and refactored. I fixed whatever bug I found, and added features I wanted. Things seem stable, but don't quote me on it. I will most likely be actively working on this until I get the features I want. This is also a learning experience for me. That is, I'm partially doing this out of a desire to learn Xlib.

Changes from xcompmgr:

• inactive window transparency (specified with -i)
• titlebar/frame transparency (specified with -e)
• shadows are now enabled for argb windows, e.g. terminals with transparency
• removed serverside shadows (and simple compositing) to clean the code, the only option that remains is clientside shadows
• menu transparency (thanks to Dana)

The above features give compton a feature set similar to the xfce compositor.

Compton has only been tested with openbox so far, but frame transparency should work with any window manager that properly sets _NET_FRAME_EXTENTS.

Fixes from the original xcompmgr:

• fixed a segfault when opening certain window types
• fixed a memory leak caused by not freeing up shadows (from the freedesktop repo)

License

xcompmgr has gotten around. As far as I can tell, the lineage for this particular tree is something like:

• Keith Packard (original author)
• Matthew Hawn
• ...
• Dana Jansens
• Myself

Not counting the tens of people who forked it in between.

Keith Packard's original license remains in the source.

Building

The same dependencies and build as xcompmgr.

Dependencies:

• libx11
• libxcomposite
• libxdamage
• libxfixes
• libxrender
• autoconf

To build, make sure you have the above dependencies:

$ ./autogen.sh
$ make

The above will produce a single binary.

Usage

$ xcompmgr -cC -t -5 -l -5 -r 5 -o 0.4 \
  -fF -I 0.065 -O 0.065 -D 6 -m 0.8 -i 0.6 -e 0.6 &

$ xcompmgr -cC -t -5 -l -5 -r 5 -o 0.4 -i 0.6 -e 0.6 &