[Xcb] [ANN]: Unagi: an XCB compositing manager
Arnaud Fontaine
arnaud at andesi.org
Thu Feb 11 04:43:06 PST 2010
Hello,
During the last year, I began writing a compositing manager as part of
my Master dissertation. After few months of inactivity because I was
busy settling down and getting a job, I'm now pleased to announce the
first release of Unagi, namely version 0.1, available there[0].
This version should be stable but as it has only be tested along with
Awesome window manager, you will certainly experience some bugs.
Moreover, for now only a source tarball is available as it is an early
release. Feel free to submit any bug reports to the BTS[1]. You can find
the Git repository there[2] and anyone is welcome to contribute!
What is Unagi?
==============
Unagi is a modular compositing manager (like xcompmgr), released under
GNU GPLv3, which aims to be efficient, lightweight and responsive. It
aims to improve window manager usability from an end-user point of view
(for instance windows translucency, application-switcher using live
thumbnails instead of plain icons, Exposé...), therefore it does not
intend at all to provide useless eye-candy effects.
It is currently written in C programming language and based on XCB
library client library. Any existing window manager can be used as long
as it implements properly EWMH and ICCCM specifications (or at least
parts of it which are needed), which is generally the case nowadays.
It relies on a modular architecture as the code is split up in three
parts: core code, rendering backends (only one backend relying on Render
X extension has been implemented so far) and visual effect plugins (only
opacity and Exposé plugins have been written so far). Thus, it provides
a small and fast compositing manager from a codebase and footprint point
of view, besides allowing to easily write other rendering backend which
would work better on certain hardware. It also tries to take advantage
of the asynchronous XCB model to be able to be used through a network.
You can find more information on the project website:
http://projects.mini-dweeb.org/projects/unagi
And some screenshots there:
http://projects.mini-dweeb.org/projects/unagi/wiki#Screenshots
Regards,
Arnaud Fontaine
[0] http://projects.mini-dweeb.org/attachments/download/89/unagi-0.1.tar.gz
[1] http://projects.mini-dweeb.org/projects/unagi/activity
[2] http://git.mini-dweeb.org/?p=arnau/unagi.git;a=summary
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