picom

picom is a compositor for X, and a fork of Compton.

This is a development branch, bugs to be expected

You can leave your feedback or thoughts in the discussion tab.

Call for testers

--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.

Change Log

See Releases

Build

Dependencies

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=false meson configure flag)
• libconfig (optional, disable with the -Dconfig_file=false meson configure flag)
• libGL (optional, disable with the -Dopengl=false meson configure flag)
• libpcre (optional, disable with the -Dregex=false meson configure flag)
• libev
• uthash

On Debian based distributions (e.g. Ubuntu), the 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 libpcre3-dev libevdev-dev uthash-dev libev-dev libx11-xcb-dev meson

On Fedora, the needed packages are

dbus-devel gcc git libconfig-devel libdrm-devel libev-devel libX11-devel libX11-xcb libXext-devel libxcb-devel mesa-libGL-devel meson pcre-devel pixman-devel uthash-devel xcb-util-image-devel xcb-util-renderutil-devel xorg-x11-proto-devel

To build the documents, you need asciidoc

To build

$ 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/lib" CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include" meson --buildtype=release . build
$ ninja -C build

To install

$ ninja -C build install

Default install prefix is /usr/local, you can change it with meson configure -Dprefix=<path> build

Nix Flake

Here's an example of using it in a nixos configuration

{
  description = "My configuration";

  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";
    picom.url = "github:yaocccc/picom";
  };

  outputs = { nixpkgs, picom, ... }:
    {
      nixosConfigurations = {
        hostname = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem
          {
            system = "x86_64-linux";
            modules = [
              {
                nixpkgs.overlays = [ picom.overlays.default ];
                environment.systemPackages = with pkgs;[
                  picom
                ];
              }
            ];
          };
      };
    };
}

How to Contribute

Code

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.

Non-code

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.

Contributors

See CONTRIBUTORS

The README for the original Compton project can be found here.

Licensing

picom is free software, made available under the MIT and MPL-2.0 software licenses. See the individual source files for details.