Compiz and Emerald
About Compiz Fusion and Emerald
Compiz Fusion is a compositing manager that allows you to easily add a wide variety of fancy effects and animations to your desktop environment. Some of the more well known - and popular - examples include:
- Turning the desktop into a 3D cube, cylinder, or sphere to switch between workspaces / virtual desktops
- Wobbly and stretchy windows
- Zooming in on the desktop
Emerald is a window decorator that allows for a wide variety new looks to be added to appplication windows. It also allows for decorations to be edited or even created from scratch. For now, there are plenty of existing Emerald themes that can be downloaded and used first.
Using Compiz Fusion and Emerald together can produce some genuinely stunning-looking desktop environments. However, even if you choose to download and install them together, you can still very easily choose to use just one or the other with your desktop environment at any time. For more information about Compiz Fusion and Emerald, the Compiz wiki can be found here.
Install Compiz Fusion and Emerald
Although it is possible to download and install them via the Add/Remove Software application provided with Manjaro, it is actually faster and easier to use the terminal, which will be used in this tutorial.
Tip: pacman will automatically download dependencies, so it is not necessary to actually specify ALL the packages we need. For example, asking pacman to download and install Emerald's themes will automatically result in downloading Emerald itself, if not already installed. This is because Emerald is a dependency of the themes.
Installation for XFCE
- To install only Compiz Fusion:
sudo pacman -S ccsm compiz-core fusion-icon compiz-fusion-plugins-extra libcompizconfig compiz-manager
- To install only Emerald:
sudo pacman -S emerald-themes
- To install both Compiz Fusion and Emerald together:
sudo pacman -S ccsm compiz-core fusion-icon emerald-themes compiz-fusion-plugins-extra libcompizconfig compiz-manager
As illustrated in the screenshot below, entering the command to install both Compiz Fusion and Emerald together has resulted in pacman automatically pulling a few extra packages as dependencies of the ones specified:
Once installed, close the terminal. It will not be necessary to reboot your machine; you can start setting them up straight away!
Installation for KDE
- To install only Compiz Fusion:
sudo pacman -S ccsm compiz-core fusion-icon compiz-fusion-plugins-extra libcompizconfig compiz-manager compiz-decorator-kde
- To install only Emerald:
sudo pacman -S emerald-themes
- To install both Compiz Fusion and Emerald together:
sudo pacman -S ccsm compiz-core fusion-icon emerald-themes compiz-fusion-plugins-extra libcompizconfig compiz-manager compiz-decorator-kde