xcompmgr
More info
- Creator
- Keith Packard
- Released
- 2003
- Type
- X11 compositor
The sample compositor that proved the Composite extension worked — drop shadows on Linux in a couple of thousand lines of C.
When Composite and Damage were new, something had to actually use them. xcompmgr was Keith Packard's demonstration: a standalone program, not a window manager, that received window contents from the server and assembled the screen with XRender. Command-line flags turned on soft shadows, fade-in on new windows and translucency.
It was never meant to be a finished product and behaved accordingly, with flicker and the occasional crash. But it ran alongside any window manager, which made it a favourite among the lightweight-desktop crowd. The compton fork took over in 2011 and picom in 2019, and both still carry traces of the original code.