🚀 I started using picom, a
compositor a few days ago as I wanted my inactive windows to be transparent.
This goes a long way into identifying the active window when you’re working with
multiple split windows on the same workspace. This has not been a problem for me
previously as I was running i3wm as my window manager and
i3status-rust for my status
bar. That meant that each window had a title bar. But I moved to
i3-gaps and
polybar to make my desktop prettier. And
with i3-gaps you need to disable the title bar that i3 adds on each
window. Thus picom as a visual indicator to quickly spot the active window
among a bunch of small windows within a workspace felt like a good
solution. Also it makes your windows prettier! 🤩
⚠️ Heads up: If you decide to go down this route, it will consume a lot of your time. A lot more than you would have originally planned. You have been warned.
🐛 Setting picom up was very straightforward, but I ran into an issue very soon:
system notifications stopped showing up completely. And the moment I killed the
picom process, all the notifications collected by the notification daemon up to
that point would pop right on screen. This had an unintended effect of becoming
a DND mode. 😛
🔔 The notification daemon I use is
dunst and it has an easy way of
turning on / off notifications on demand. So I didn’t necessarily need this side
effect from running picom. It definitely came across to me as a bug and not a
feature. Jokes apart. This bugged me for the last five days. I searched the web
but was unable to find anything related to this.
⚙️ In picom, the user can set different opacity levels (opposite of
transparency) for different windows. So an opacity level of 0.9 makes a window
only slightly transparent, while an opacity level of 0.1 would make it almost
transparent and barely visible.
🤔 I tried configuring this for dunst windows but to no effect. Finally I tried
to install and run another compositor,
xcompmgr to see if I was able
to reproduce the issue. And unsurprisingly I had the same problem with
xcompmgr as well. This helped me with my direction of debugging the issue
immediately. I started feeling that the issue had to be coming out of dunst
itself and not picom. So I looked up my dunstrc (the config file for
dunst) and started reading through it. And soon enough I found this setting
there:
transparency = 100
👀 At first glance I thought it was the right setting. Remember in picom
above, a higher number means more opaque. But then I read the man pages for
dunst where it was clear that a higher number means more transparency (quite
expected by the word itself). I’ve been using dunst for a few years already so
there is a good chance I made that edit at some point as the default value for
this setting is 0. That is, this was a bug of my own making (like most bugs
anyway!).
So I immediately updated my dunstrc file:
transparency = 0
🎉 Restarted dunst and voila! The notifications started showing up when
picom was running. And that too without any additional configurations on
picom! I can now go back to using DND in dunst the way the authors intended. 😅