CHANGELOG.md

v13-rc1 (2025-Dec-09)

New features

• Separate the "geometry" animation trigger into "size" and "position" to allow finer-grained control. "geometry" is kept as an alias for setting both "size" and "position".
• Add a "urgent" target that can be used in rules to match urgent (according to ICCCM) windows. (#1445)
• New "shadow-color" per-window option can now be used in rules to give each window a different shadow color. (#257)
• Added new animation trigger color, which can now be used to transition window shadow-color changes. (#257)
• Add support for using custom shaders when rendering the desktop background. (#1440)
• New variables "window-blur-opacity-before", and "window-blur-opacity" are now available in animation scripts. (#919)
• New per-window option blur-opacity can now be used in rules. (#919)
• Macro definitions can now be specified when setting shader in window rules. (#1066)

Deprecations

• --legacy-backends is now deprecated. Setting it no longer has an effect.
• resize-damage, glx-no-stencil and glx-no-rebind-pixmap are now deprecated, because they only works on legacy backends.
• Removed several options that have been deprecated for a long time, this includes:
  • glx-fshader-win
  • glx-swap-method
  • glx-use-gpushader4
  • menu-opacity
  • vsync-aggressive
  • respect-prop-shadow
  • sw-opti
  • clear-shadow

Behavior changes

• The desktop background image is no longer smeared to fill the screen. If it's too small, it will be too small. (#1464)

Bug fixes

• Fix sometimes window property changes aren't reflected in picom.
• Fix shadow-opacity being applied twice. You may need to adjust your shadow-opacity settings.
• Properly fix the longstanding "request too big" problem when uploading shadow images. (Previous workaround: 69b3eee76b6f3ec6be1d2402151d8882279a74a4) (#257)
• Fix window frames not being blended correctly when using frame-opacity with saved-image-blend.
• Fix shadow not being correctly masked when scaled. (#1389)
• Fix misaligned shadow and window when they are scaled. (#1389)
• Fix unexpected relative movement between shadow and window when they are scaled. (#1389)
• background blur does not cover the entire background if the window has rounded corner and is scaled.
• Fix shaders in window-shader-fg-rule being erroneously reported as failed to load.
• Fix --blur-background-fixed having no effect. (#1402)
• Fix assertion failure when running with some window managers (e.g. qtile) and no window is focused (#1384)

Other changes

• Hide picom from menus by default (#1155)

Internal changes

• Breaking change to backend API, to allow better image creation, and applying tints to windows.
• Refactor shadow rendering, preparing for dynamic shadow colors.
• Backend API 2.0 breaking change, backend_mask_image.origin is now a vec2.
• Backend API 2.0 breaking change, backend_blur_args now has source_mask_scale.
• Backend API 2.0 breaking change, backend_blit_args.shader is now shader_handle instead of void *.

12.4 (2024-Nov-09)

Improvements

• Better workaround for a NVIDIA qurik, fix high CPU usage when screen is off (#1265)
• Avoid using xrender convolution in all cases, should improve shadow performance for most users. (#1349)

Bug fixes

• Fix leak of saved window images.

Build fixes

• Fix build on arm32 (#1355)

12.3 (2024-Oct-14)

Improvements

• Extend workaround for missing hardware accelerated convolution to more drivers (#1349)

Bug fixes

• Fix memory corruption that can happen when handling window property changes (#1350)
• Fix force-win-blend having no effect (#1354)
• Fix shadow being rendered incorrectly in xrender backend (#1352)

12.2 (2024-Oct-10)

Improvements

• fly-out/slide-out animation presets no longer cause jumps in window opacity

Bug fixes

• Random delays before screen is updated (#1345 #1330)
• Fix building on 32-bit systems (#1346)
• Fix blank screen on 32-bit systems
• Fix fly-in/fly-out animation presets so they work with directions other than up and left

v12.1 (2024-Sep-29)

Bug fixes

• picom stops rendering correctly after monitor configuration changes (#1338, thanks to @Suyooo)

v12 (2024-Sep-27)

Bug fixes

• Fix crash related to window leader updates (#1337 + extra).
• Remove an invalid assertion.

v12-rc4 (2024-Sep-08)

Bug fixes

• Windows become completely black when rules and inactive-dim are set at the same time
• Fix segmentation fault during unredirection if the geometry change animation is used (#1333, thanks to @monsterovich)
• Fix many rare race conditions in the window management code (#1334)

v12-rc3 (2024-Aug-30)

Bug fixes

• transparent-clipping has no effect (#1317)
• unredir in window rules not being parsed correctly
• Changing window opacity with picom-trans does not take effect immediately (#1315)

Documentation

• Document behavior change around rounded corners and fullscreen windows (#1323)

v12-rc2 (2024-Aug-17)

Bug fixes

• Setting corner-radius to 0 cause all windows to not render (#1311)
• Setting corner-radius causes windows to have a 1-pixel transparent border
• Window shaders no longer work (#1312)

v12-rc1 (2024-Aug-12)

New features

• Animations! Yes, now picom officially supports animations. For examples, and information on how to configure it, please go to our documentation site. There are some video clips in #1253 as well. (#1220 #1253 #1303 #1305 #1308 #1310)

• Universal window rules (#1284). One option to rule them all! Added new configuration option rules to replace all existing rule options, and to provide more flexibility on top of that. See picom(1) for more details. This can be used to configure per-window animations.

• @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. man picom-inspect(1) for more details. 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.
• New predefined target for conditions: group_focused. This target indicate whether the focused window is in the same window group as the window being matched.
• Meaning of window_type in conditions changed slightly, now it supports windows with multiple types. (However the behavior of wintypes remains unchanged.)

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)
• Fix ugly looking rounded corners (#1261)

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.