A Compositor For i3: PiCom

In my last tutorial, I mentioned how I would make an article about how to add a compositor, Like the image at the start of the article. Personally I don't use a compositor, as they are pretty hardware intensive and a bit spotty in some cases. In this guide we will install the x11 compositor PiCom. It will add cool stuff like transparent terminal emulators, animations etc.

Installing PiCom

Installing PiCom is rather simple, all you have to do is grab it from pacman and execute it on i3's startup. Here's the commands:

$ pacman -S picom
$ vim ~/.config/i3/config

Now add a line that says exec picom &. You can save that and restart i3.

Configuring PiCom

Run this command:

$ mkdir ~/.config/picom
$ cp /etc/xdg/picom.conf ~/.config/picom/

That will copy the default config to the .config folder. Open it up in your text editor.

Now you can configure it to your heart's content. For example I added blur-background = true; so that my terminal emulator could have a cool blur to it.

Configuring terminal emulators

This guide will be for ricing the termite terminal emulator.

Copy the default config to your configs:

$ cp /etc/xdg/termite/config ~/.config/termite/config

In this config, there will be a line that says #background = rgba(63, 63, 63, 0.8). Comment out that line and save the file.

And this is nearing the end of my tutorial! Make sure to troubleshoot using the ArchWiki!