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
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
- Being short, so it's easy to remember.
- Pronounceability, again, helps memorability
- Searchability, so when people search the name, it's easy for them to find this repository.
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:
- All mentions of
comptonwill be updated topicomin the code base.comptonwill still be installed, but only as a symlink topicom. Whenpicomis 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. - 3 major releases after step 1, the warning messages will be prompted to error messages and
picomwill not start when launched via the symlink. - 3 major releases after step 2, the symlink will be removed.
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:
- libx11
- libx11-xcb
- libXext
- xproto
- xcb
- xcb-damage
- xcb-xfixes
- xcb-shape
- xcb-renderutil
- xcb-render
- xcb-randr
- xcb-composite
- xcb-image
- xcb-present
- xcb-xinerama
- xcb-glx
- pixman
- libdbus (optional, disable with the
-Ddbus=falsemeson configure flag) - libconfig (optional, disable with the
-Dconfig_file=falsemeson configure flag) - libGL (optional, disable with the
-Dopengl=falsemeson configure flag) - libpcre (optional, disable with the
-Dregex=falsemeson configure flag) - libev
- uthash
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 buildBuilt 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 installDefault 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