E19 Moves Along With New Compositor, Wayland Support

Enlightenment E19 is advancing its support for Wayland as an alternative to X.Org and it also has a rewritten compositor.

In the early hours of this morning I wrote about Enlightenment's compositor seeing a huge rewrite after all the code landed and was spotted by Anzwix. The E19 release manager, Michael Blumenkrantz, has now blogged about the changes for this next major Enlightenment release due out likely at the end of the year.

This morning's article noted that supported for the new X PRESENT extension had landed, there's a new "advanced compositor" feature, new effects landed, and the compositor and window management code saw a huge rewrite.

Mike explained in his blog post today that with E19 the compositor is now integrated with the rest of the architecture compared to the compositor design found in E17 and E18. "This lets us do neat things like treat clients (regardless of whether they’re X or Wayland) as regular canvas objects. Moving/resizing/restacking canvas objects is much easier than doing the same for “windows”! It also makes it a lot easier to do some other things like bring back the E16 pager or do some slightly more advanced move/resize/flip effects, such as those provided by the desksanity module."

The other big piece to E19 will be better Wayland integration. The Wayland support is much simpler and better off with E19 than it was with E18. Some other E19 action items include an E16-like live pager, external handling of some animations, new configuration options, and other tuning and bug-fixes.

More details on the Enlightenment E19 work can be found from this blog post.