picom/CHANGELOG.md

Unreleased

New features

• @include directives in config file now also search in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/picom/include and $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/picom/include, in addition to relative to the config file's parent directory.

• Allow corner-radius-rules to override corner-radius = 0. Previously setting corner radius to 0 globally disables rounded corners. (#1170)

• New picom-inspect tool, which lets you test out your picom rules. Sample output:

  ...
  Checking rounded-corners-exclude:
      window_type = "dock" ... not matched
      window_type = "desktop" ... not matched
      window_type *= "menu" ... not matched
      fullscreen = 1 ... not matched
  Checking opacity-rule:
      _NET_WM_STATE@[0] *= "_NET_WM_STATE_HIDDEN" ... not matched
  Checking corner-radius-rule:
      class_g = "Alacritty" ... matched/10
  
  Here are some rule(s) that match this window:
      name = '[0.2.1] ./picom-inspect: ~/p/picom(./picom-inspect: ~/p/picom)*'
      class_i = 'Alacritty'
      class_g = 'Alacritty'
      window_type = 'normal'
      ! fullscreen
      border_width = 0
  

• picom now has a rudimentary plugin system. At the moment, the only thing you can do with it is loading custom backends.

Notable changes

• override_redirect in rules now only matches top-level windows that doesn't have a client window. Some window managers (e.g. awesome) set override_redirect for all window manager frame windows, causing this rule to match against everything (#625).
• Marginally improve performance when resizing/opening/closing windows. (#1190)
• Type and format specifiers are no longer used in rules. These specifiers are what you put after the colon (':') in rules, e.g. the :32c in "_GTK_FRAME_EXTENTS@:32c". Now this information is ignored and the property is matched regardless of format or type.
• backend is now a required option. picom will not start if one is not specified explicitly.

Deprecated features

• Setting --shadow-exclude-reg is now a hard error. It was deprecated almost since the start of picom. --clip-shadow-above is the better alternative. (#1254)
• Remove command line options -n, -a, and -s. They were removed more than 10 years ago, it's time to finally get rid of them entirely. (#1254)
• Remove error message for --glx-swap-method, it was deprecated in v6.
• Remove error message for passing argument to --vsync arguments, it was deprecated in v5.
• Option --opengl is now deprecated, use --backend=glx instead.

Bug fixes

• Fix ghosting artifacts that sometimes occur when window manager is restarted (#1081)
• Fix a bug where rounded corner is disabled after making a window fullscreen and back (#1216)

Build changes

• picom now uses some OpenGL 4.3 features.
• picom now optionally depends on rtkit at runtime to give itself realtime scheduling priority.
• libconfig is now a mandatory dependency, with a minimal supported version of 1.7.
• xcb-dpms is not needed anymore.
• libXext is not needed anymore.
• man pages are now built with asciidoctor, instead of asciidoc.

Behind the scene changes

• The X critical section is removed, picom no longer grabs the server to fetch updates. Hopefully, if everything works, this change is unnoticeable. Minor responsiveness improvements could be possible, but I won't bet on it. The main point of this change is this makes debugging much less painful. Previously if you breaks inside the X critical section, the whole X server will lock up, and you would have to connect to the computer remotely to recover. Now there is no longer such worries. This also avoids a bug inside Xorg that makes server grabbing unreliable.

v11.2 (2024-Feb-13)

Build changes

• picom now depends on libepoxy for OpenGL symbol management.

Bug fixes

• Workaround a NVIDIA problem that causes high CPU usage after suspend/resume (#1172, #1168)
• Fix building on OpenBSD (#1189, #1188)
• Fix occasional freezes (#1040, #1145, #1166)
• Fix corner-radius-rules not applying sometimes (#1177)
• Fix window shader not having an effect when frame opacity is enabled (#1174)
• Fix binding root pixmap in case of depth mismatch (#984)

v11.1 (2024-Jan-28)

Bug fixes

• Fix missing fading on window close for some window managers. (#704)

v11 (2024-Jan-20)

Build changes

• Due to some caveats discovered related to setting the CAP_SYS_NICE capability, it is now recommended to NOT set this capability for picom.

Deprecations

• Uses of --sw-opti, and --respect-prop-shadow are now hard errors.
• -F has been removed completely. It was deprecated before the picom fork.

v11-rc1 (2024-Jan-14)

Notable features

• picom now uses dithering to prevent banding. Banding is most notable when using a strong background blur. (#952)
• Frame pacing. picom uses present feedback information to schedule new frames when it makes sense to do so. This improves latency, and replaces the glFlush and GL_MaxFramesAllowed=1 hacks we used to do for NVIDIA. (#968 #1156)
• Some missing features have been implemented for the EGL backend (#1004 #1007)

Bug fixes

• Many memory/resource leak fixes thanks to @absolutelynothelix . (#977 #978 #979 #980 #982 #985 #992 #1009 #1022)
• Fix tiling of wallpaper. (#1002)
• Fix some blur artifacts (#1095)
• Fix shadow color for transparent shadows (#1124)
• Don't spam logs when another compositor is running (#1104)
• Fix rounded corners showing as black with the xrender backend (#1003)
• Fix blur with rounded windows (#950)

Build changes

• Dependency pcre has been replaced by pcre2.
• New dependency xcb-util.
• xinerama is no longer used.
• picom now tries to give itself a real-time scheduling priority. Please consider giving picom the CAP_SYS_NICE capability when packaging it.

Deprecations

• The kawase blur method is removed. Note this is just an alias to the dual_kawase method, which is still available. (#1102)

Earlier versions

Please see the GitHub releases page.