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, or chat with other users on discord!

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-util
• xcb-damage
• xcb-dpms
• xcb-xfixes
• xcb-shape
• xcb-renderutil
• xcb-render
• xcb-randr
• xcb-composite
• xcb-image
• xcb-present
• 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, libEGL, libepoxy (optional, disable with the -Dopengl=false meson configure flag)
• libpcre2 (optional, disable with the -Dregex=false meson configure flag)
• libev
• uthash

On Debian based distributions (e.g. Ubuntu), the needed packages are

libconfig-dev libdbus-1-dev libegl-dev libev-dev libgl-dev libepoxy-dev libpcre2-dev libpixman-1-dev libx11-xcb-dev libxcb1-dev libxcb-composite0-dev libxcb-damage0-dev libxcb-dpms0-dev libxcb-glx0-dev libxcb-image0-dev libxcb-present-dev libxcb-randr0-dev libxcb-render0-dev libxcb-render-util0-dev libxcb-shape0-dev libxcb-util-dev libxcb-xfixes0-dev libxext-dev meson ninja-build uthash-dev

On Fedora, the needed packages are

dbus-devel gcc git libconfig-devel libdrm-devel libev-devel libX11-devel libX11-xcb libXext-devel libxcb-devel libGL-devel libEGL-devel libepoxy-devel meson pcre2-devel pixman-devel uthash-devel xcb-util-image-devel xcb-util-renderutil-devel xorg-x11-proto-devel xcb-util-devel

To build the documents, you need asciidoc

To build

$ meson setup --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 setup --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 setup --buildtype=release build
$ ninja -C build

To install

AUR (arch)

• picom-ftlabs-git Thanks to @Fxzzi for maintaining the package.

$ ninja -C build install

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

Running

To launch with all animations as a background process you can use: picom --animations -b

To only have specific animations, enable them with cli flags (see picom --help) or add them to your picom config.

How to Contribute

All contributions are welcome!

New features you think should be included in picom, a fix for a bug you found - please open a PR!

You can take a look at the Issues.

Contributions to the documents and wiki are also appreciated.

Even if you don't want to add anything to picom, you are still helping by compiling and running this branch, and report any issue you can find.

Become a Collaborator

Becoming a collaborator of picom requires significant time commitment. You are expected to reply to issue reports, reviewing PRs, and sometimes fix bugs or implement new feature. You won't be able to push to the main branch directly, and all you code still has to go through code review.

If this sounds good to you, feel free to contact me.

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.