All information regarding compton and compton.conf

End of January 2019 compton has received a major update from version 4 to 5.

We use it on 5 of 12 desktops at the time of writing.

  • awesome
  • bspwm
  • i3
  • openbox
  • xmonad

Needless to say it has a big impact.

Compton will provide you the following functionality :

  • shading
  • transparency
  • fading

Many of the old parameters in the compton.conf were abandoned and new ones were introduced.

It made us look again at the original compton.conf file from the official github :

https://github.com/yshui/compton

We then compared our own settings and mixed both together.

Next video is about the steps we took that month.

Some of the desktops have also a folder called backup with the old compton.confs in it. You can always go back in time and compare settings that way.

compton.conf =ArcoLinux compton.conf

compton.conf.github = https://github.com/yshui/compton

 

Fix for dark virtualbox in full screen

Virtual Box becomes darker when you go full screen in the old compton.conf file so we added this line :

shadow-exclude = [

“n:w:*VirtualBox*”,
..
];

This ensures us that VirtualBox will not get any shading and become darker than it is supposed to be.

ArcoLinux users just need to update and skel to get this in. Other linux users should add the line to their compton.conf file.

Before adding code line

After adding code line

There is NOT just ONE compton.conf for ALL
Backup and experiment

Try switching xrender with glx.

Experimenting with compton settings

Possible configs that might work for you

backend = “glx”
glx-no-stencil = true;
glx-no-rebind-pixmap = true;
vsync = “opengl-swc”;

Where is the compton.conf

Awesome : ~/.config/awesome/compton.conf

Bspwm : ~/.config/bspwm/compton.conf

i3 : ~/.config/i3/compton.conf

Openbox : ~/.config/compton.conf

Qtile : ~/.config/qtile/scripts/compton.conf

Xmonad : ~/.xmonad/scripts/compton.conf

Many of your desktops have a backup of this configuration file.