Picom

Picom: X11 Window Compositor with Shadows, Transparency & Animations

A lightweight compositor for X11 window managers improving user experience with visual effects like shadows, transparency and animations.

What is Picom?

Picom is a lightweight compositor for X11 window managers such as Openbox, Fluxbox, JWM, and many others. It provides various visual effects and animations to make the desktop environment look modern and sleek.

As a compositor, picom takes over the task of drawing windows and handles visual effects like drop shadows, transparency, window animations when opening, closing, minimizing, etc. This improves perceived performance and enables effects that otherwise could not be achieved without a compositor.

Key features of picom include:

• Animated transitions when a window gets open, closed, minimized, maximized, or any other state change
• Per-window transparency and shadows
• Fading of inactive windows
• Custom blur background for transparent windows
• Window animations requiring no other support from the window manager
• Very lightweight on system resource usage

In summary, picom provides an easy way to get modern composited effects on lightweight window managers that do not have built-in composition. It improves perceived performance and visual appeal without hogging system resources.

Picom Features

Official Links