NeoComp (Compton)

NeoComp is a fork of Compton, a compositor for X11

NeoComp is a (hopefully) fast and (hopefully) simple compositor for X11, focused on delivering frames from the window to the framebuffer as quickly as possible.

I'm currently running this compositor as my daily driver, and it seems mostly stable. It crashes once in a while when I do silly stress-testy stuff, but for normal usages it's pretty alright.

The compositor is far enough along to benchmark, and since part of the goal is being faster than compton, it only makes sense to actually publish and discuss them. For windows that deliberately ask for raw X11 (no compositing) we support selective redirection, meaning those windows should have raw X11 performance. for everything else, we expect a (small) performance hit. To measure this hit, I've used typometer and termite to compare the input latency for compton, neocomp, and raw X11. The results are seen in the graph below.

Since the purpose of the test is low input delay, compton was run without vsync. The results for vsync-enabled looks similar, but more stable. Neocomp has no support for running without vsync, so it has vsync enabled. The tests were done on my normal configuration, which means blurring background is enabled, shadows are enabled, dimming is enabled, and compton uses the glx backend.

It might be possible to tune compton to be faster, but that's not the point of the test.

Neocomp also has a bunch of nice debugging features. It features instrumentation for a custom profiler, which outputs json readable by the tracer in chrome. It also has debug rendering modes, which draws some internal state to the display (making it easier to debug with frame dissection tools like apitrace).

There's a lot of other features in here as well, like bezier curve fading, shader customization, and compliant texture binding (other compositors seem to break the spec by not rebinding the texture when the contents change, and not grabbing the xserver for the duration of the bind). Some day I might list all the features.

Building

To build, make sure you have the dependencies (yeah I know) then run:

# Make the main program
$ make
# Make the man pages
$ make docs
# Install
$ make install

Usage

The man pages are completely out of date, but still your best bet. Some options from the man pages have been removed, and some added. You might have to look in the code. I'd love to accept contributions on this front.

License

I don't know of the lineage behind Compton. All contributions made by me are GPL. If any previous contributor would like to claim ownership over some part and dispute the license, please open an issue.

NeoComp is licensed under GPLv3