chjj/compton is tracked by TopGit as an open-source project, with 2.3k stars on GitHub, written primarily in C. A compositor for X11.
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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:
OpenGL backend (--backend glx), in addition to the old X Render backend.
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
configuration files (see the man page for more details)
colored shadows (--shadow-[red/green/blue])
a new fade system
VSync support (not always working)
Blur of background of transparent windows, window color inversion (bad in performance)
Some more options...
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)
fixed the conflict with chromium and similar windows
many more
Building
Dependencies:
B for build-time
R for runtime
libx11 (B,R)
libxcomposite (B,R)
libxdamage (B,R)
libxfixes (B,R)
libXext (B,R)
libxrender (B,R)
libXrandr (B,R)
libXinerama (B,R) (Can be disabled with NO_XINERAMA at compile time)
pkg-config (B)
make (B)
xproto / x11proto (B)
sh (R)
xprop,xwininfo / x11-utils (R)
libpcre (B,R) (Can be disabled with NO_REGEX_PCRE at compile time)
libconfig (B,R) (Can be disabled with NO_LIBCONFIG at compile time)
libdrm (B) (Can be disabled with NO_VSYNC_DRM at compile time)
libGL (B,R) (Can be disabled with NO_VSYNC_OPENGL at compile time)
libdbus (B,R) (Can be disabled with NO_DBUS at compile time)
asciidoc (B) (and docbook-xml-dtd-4.5, libxml-utils, libxslt, xsltproc, xmlto, etc. if your distro doesn't pull them in)
How to build
To build, make sure you have the dependencies above:
# Make the main program
$ make
# Make the man pages
$ make docs
# Install
$ make install
(Compton does include a _CMakeLists.txt in the tree, but we haven't decided whether we should switch to CMake yet. The Makefile is fully usable right now.)
Known issues
Our FAQ covers some known issues.
VSync does not work too well. You may check the VSync Guide for how to get (possibly) better effects.
If --unredir-if-possible is enabled, when compton redirects/unredirects windows, the screen may flicker. Using --paint-on-overlay minimizes the problem from my observation, yet I do not know if there's a cure.
compton may not track focus correctly in all situations. The focus tracking code is experimental. --use-ewmh-active-win might be helpful.
The performance of blur under X Render backend might be pretty bad. OpenGL backend could be faster.
With --blur-background you may sometimes see weird lines around damaged area. --resize-damage YOUR_BLUR_RADIUS might be helpful in the case.
Usage
Please refer to the Asciidoc man pages (man/compton.1.asciidoc & man/compton-trans.1.asciidoc) for more details and examples.
Note a sample configuration file compton.sample.conf is included in the repository.
Support
Bug reports and feature requests should go to the "Issues" section above.
Our (semi?) official IRC channel is #compton on FreeNode.
Some information is available on the wiki, including FAQ, VSync Guide, and Performance Guide.
License
Although compton has kind of taken on a life of its own, it was originally
an xcompmgr fork. 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
chjj and richardgv
Not counting the tens of people who forked it in between.
Compton is distributed under MIT license, as far as I (richardgv) know. See LICENSE for more info.
The most recent commit recorded on chjj/compton was 5.1 years ago, based on the GitHub push timestamp. The repository has 488 forks — one of the better signals of community interest.
How many stars does chjj/compton have?
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Is chjj/compton open source?
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What is chjj/compton?
chjj/compton (chjj/compton) is a C project on GitHub. From the project's own README: A compositor for X11.
Where do I read more about chjj/compton?
This TopGit page is a snapshot — the READ ME tab shows the project's own README content (links stripped, images preserved). The GitHub repository at github.com/chjj/compton is the definitive source.
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