picom

Picom

Picom is a lightweight compositor for X11 window managers. It provides effects like shadows, transparency, and animations to improve the user experience. As a compositor, picom draws windows and handles visual effects separately from the window manager.
Os & Utilities System Enhancements
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compositor visual-effects transparency animations x11 window-manager
Picom alternatives ➤

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

Features

  1. Compositing for X11 window managers
  2. Provides visual effects like shadows, transparency, and animations
  3. Handles drawing of windows and visual effects separately from the window manager
  4. Lightweight and efficient
  5. Customizable effects and behaviors

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Improves the overall user experience with visual enhancements

Lightweight and doesn't consume a lot of system resources

Highly customizable to fit user preferences

Actively maintained and developed

Cons

May require additional configuration to work with certain window managers

Some effects may not be compatible with certain applications or setups

May not work as expected on older or less powerful hardware

Official Links

Official Website
https://github.com/yshui/picom

The Best Picom Alternatives

Top Os & Utilities and System Enhancements and other similar apps like Picom

Here are some alternatives to Picom:

Compton icon
Compton
Xcompmgr icon
Xcompmgr
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Compton icon

Compton

Compton is an open-source compositing manager for the X window system. It allows for cool visual effects like transparency, shadows, fading, and animations that make the desktop more aesthetically pleasing and usable.Some key features and highlights of Compton include:Lightweight design that doesn't use a lot of system resourcesHardware acceleration support...
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Xcompmgr icon

Xcompmgr

Xcompmgr is a basic compositing manager for the X Window System that aims to enable basic desktop effects for window managers that do not natively provide compositing functionality. Some of the effects enabled by Xcompmgr include:Transparency and alpha blending of windowsDrop shadows under windowsRedirection of windows, allowing windows to be...
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