xsnow-comp-patch: Compositor-Friendly Patch for Xsnow

This is a patch that teaches Rick Jansen's Xsnow 1.42 how to play nicely with manual WM setups that use a standalone compositor like picom.

How it works

xsnow draws on the X Window System's root window, which picom obscures. The patched version creates a new bottom-level window and draws on it instead, but only if it detects a running compositor or if xsnow is invoked with the -nouseroot flag. The new window uses pure 32-bit black as a background color, which transparency-enabled compositors should render as transparent.

You may want to use the -nouseroot flag if you want xsnow to have a background color, but you don't want your background to retain that color when xsnow terminates.

The new window has a class and classname of xsnow.

Known Bugs

• The patch relies on some inefficient magic to show the snow, so running xsnow with the patch can increase Xorg's CPU usage by up to 8 percentage points and increase compton/picom's by up to 4. Fixing this may be impossible.
• The patch also changes xsnow's color environment to 32-bit, which appears to be incompatible with Santa's pixmaps. For now, Santa is automatically disabled if running with a compositor or -nouseroot.
• The patched version is greedy and breaks wew (from wmutils/opt)'s XCB_ENTER_NOTIFY notifications. See issue #1.

Compatibility

I have not tested the patch extensively. Please let me know if it works for your setup.

Testing shows that xsnow-comp-patch works with:

• bspwm + compton/picom
• i3/-gaps + compton/picom
• fluxbox + compton/picom
• xmonad + compton/picom

But doesn't work with:

• Unity

Dependencies

Installation

With a Package

Arch Linux

Install xsnow-comp-patch-git from the AUR.

Building from Source

1. If you plan to install xsnow-comp-patch to your system, you should remove the xsnow package first.

2. Save the latest version of xsnow-comp.patch from this repository.

    mkdir -p /your/builds/xsnow-comp/
    cd /your/builds/xsnow-comp/
    git clone 'this-repository' patch/
   

3. Download the latest version of xsnow from its homepage and unpack it:

    wget 'http://dropmix.xs4all.nl/rick/Xsnow/xsnow-1.42.tar.gz'
    tar -xzf xsnow-1.42.tar.gz
   

4. Change into the unpacked xsnow directory and apply the patch:

    cd xsnow-1.42
    cat ../patch/xsnow-comp.patch | patch -p1
   

5. Run make and install:

   xmkmf
   make depend
   make
   sudo make install
   sudo make install.man
   

Licensing

Xsnow has not been released under an open source license, which is why I'm not hosting the full modified source code for xsnow-comp-patch. Rick Jansen's full copyright statement follows:

Xsnow is available freely and you may give it to other people as is, but I retain all rights. Therefore it does not classify as 'Public Domain' software. It is allowed to package Xsnow for Unix/Linux distributions, CD-Roms etc, and to make the necessary changes to makefiles etc. to facilitate this.

Please feel free to redistribute this patch however you like. The code I have added falls under the MIT license, which is included in the patch.

Previous developers

[email protected]: Original author Icelk: Maintainer

Contributing

Once you apply the patch to xsnow, you'll have my development environment. If you want to contribute, you can file a pull request on GitHub.