Beryl (window manager)

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Beryl

Screenshot of Ubuntu using Beryl: dragging a maximized window to reveal the desktop.
Maintainer:	QuinnStorm, iXce and others
Stable release:	N/A _[+/-]
Preview release:	0.1.2 (November 7, 2006) _[+/-]
OS:	Unix-like
Use:	Compositing manager
License:	GPL
Website:	www.beryl-project.org

Beryl is a compositing window manager for the X Window System. It is a fork of Compiz.

1 Origin
2 Differences
3 Window decorators
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Origin

Beryl is the new project name for the Quinnstorm branch of Compiz, announced on 19 September 2006 after Quinnstorm and the development team decided that the fork had come too far from the original Compiz started by Novell (compiz-vanilla). After the Novell XGL/Compiz team (mostly David Reveman) refused the proposition to merge the Quinnstorm changes with compiz-vanilla, the decision was made to make a real differentiation.^[1]^[2]^[3] As of 20 October 2006, version 0.1.1 has been released into the original compiz-quinnstorm repositories and mirrors. On 9 December 2006, version 0.1.3 was released for testing purposes.

[edit] Differences

Notable differences between Compiz and Beryl, as listed on the Beryl FAQ are the following:

The window decorator, formerly known as cgwd, is now named emerald. Currently, a cgwd theme can be ported to emerald by changing the extension from .cgwd to .emerald.
Uses flat file backend instead of gconf, almost no GNOME dependency.
Has a large variety of extra plugins, and enhanced features in other plugins.
It has a themeable decorator called emerald.
It has a theme manager called emerald-theme-manager.
Changes frequently: new features are added on a daily basis.
Made by a community at Beryl Project Forums.

[edit] Window decorators

Like Compiz and unlike traditional window managers, Beryl delegates the drawing of window borders to a separate process, called a window decorator. There are currently three of them, all named after varieties of beryl, although only Emerald is currently considered stable.

Emerald, the default window decorator and a fork of cgwd, has its own theme format and supports effects like alpha transparency.
Heliodor, a fork of Compiz's gtk-window-decorator, supports Metacity themes.
Aquamarine supports KWin themes.