Background

I'm considering to switch to a tiling window manager (such as xmonad) and have begun researching the options. One thing that's struck me is that in order to get nice effects in these WMs (like transparency, shadows etc.), most users still rely on Xcompmgr and forks of it. As far as I know Xcompmgr was designed as a proof of concept and there seems to be many problems with it.

What this has to do with KWin

KWin has an excellent composite manager. I see several benefits with it:
- It's stable.
- It's fast.
- It has many nice options.
- It can easily be switched on and off.

However, since KWin replaces the current window manager, it's not possible to use the compositor with e.g. xmonad. Therefore I wonder if there are any plans to separate the compositor from the KWin window manager, allowing the use of the two components separately. This would fit with the goal of modularizing KWin and would further narrow the gap between different desktops/shells/whatever you call them and WMs.

As a side note, this was also mentioned on Martin's blog: http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2 ... ment-41158

The compositor is too integrated with the window manager to split it out of KWin. Even if it were in a state that you could get it integrated into another WM it would probably require more code to glue the compositor to xmonad than xmonad has overall.

My recommendation: help on the work to get a window tiling script for KWin.

Thanks for the answer. I'll play around with different tiling window managers for a bit and see what I like and don't like.