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.
• Inactive window transparency (-i) / dimming (--inactive-dim).
• Titlebar/frame transparency (-e).
• Menu transparency (-m, thanks to Dana).
• 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
Comments and Reviews
Tiny and useful compositor not depending on any toolkit.