[Xcb] [ANN]: Unagi: an XCB compositing manager

[Arnaud Fontaine]

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