Move over Aero, Beryl is here!

The open source community has triggered warning bells for Microsoft with the release of Beryl, the open source window manager, which is direct competition for Aero technology bundled with the latest version of Windows, Windows Vista.

Beryl is a combined window manager and compositing manager written in C that runs on top of Xgl or AIGLX using OpenGL to provide effects accelerated by a 3D graphics card on the desktop. Beryl is a fork of the Compiz project, started by David Reveman of Novell.

It is designed to be highly flexible, extensible, and portable, all the while keeping in mind that the users know how they want their desktops to act better than the developers do. With Beryl the rather esoteric concept of the computer desktop is brought down to a more human level, allowing for a more native and intuitive understanding of the user’s workspace.

With an extensive feature list and modest system requirements, Beryl is poised to give Microsoft Windows’ Aero technology a run for it’s money.

Some of its features include:

Scale Effect

OS X Expose Like Effect
Beryl allows users to activate the scale effect to find and switch between windows easily. Switching between windows using the scale effect is as easy as clicking on the thumbnail you want and Beryl will automatically pull up the selected window.

Live Window Previews
As is the staple of all Beryl Effects, the windows show in the Scale effect are live previews. Movies continue to play, websites update. By right clicking on any given window, it will be zoomed back to full size for closer inspection.

Drag and Drop Support
Dragging and dropping documents from folder to folder has never been easier. Overlapping windows are no longer an issue, just grab the document you wish to drag and drop, initiate scale with your mouse, and hover over the window you wish to drop it on. Easy…

Enhanced Switcher

Improved Visual Identification
The new switcher replaces the old boring icon based switcher. Now providing the user with live previews of their windows. Switching between many windows of the same app with Alt+Tab no longer requires reading the sometimes ambiguous window name.

Better Selectiong Control
By pressing Alt+Tab you can easily browse through windows on your current viewport. Or if you wish to browse through all windows on all desktops, pressing Ctrl+Alt+Tab will allow you to do so.

See Only What You Want
If you wish, the new switcher can be configured to dim all windows but the active one making your entire desktop your switcher. If you switch to a window not on your current viewport, the cube will rotate to show you.

Desktop Cube

Visualize Your Workspace
The human mind thinks very well in 3 dimensions, so why limit yourself to only two? Beryl can display your viewports as a cube, making it easier to organize your desktop. For the diehards though, the cube is unobtrusive as possible for these users.

See Through The Clutter
Optionally the cube may be turned transparent to allow a user to see whats on the other side of the cube at all times. This feature is working but is planned to be in a future release.

See Even More
For some the cube doesn’t present enough information, only really showing the user one workspace at a time. In these situations it can be unfolded to show several viewports at once in a film strip style view by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Page Down.

Window Effects

Transparency, Brightness, and Saturation
The transparency, brightness, and saturation of a window can easily be changed simply by right clicking on its title bar and setting it in the menu. It can also be set via mouse bindings.

Gnome Terminal True Transparency
With Beryl providing a proper composited environment, Gnome Terminal can now use true transparency. That means you can see the windows below it instead of a copy of the wallpaper below it.

Negative Windows
Like the negative of a film camera, the color values of windows can be inverted. This simple inversion makes it much easier to read text in many situations and is often quite easier on the eyes. Neg is as simple as Super+n.

Blur Effects

Eliminate the Clutter
One of the longstanding issues of transparent terminals been that reading the text over whatever was behind it became very difficult. Beryl allows users to blur what is behind their windows effectively removing hard lines that making reading difficult.

Read Your Titlebar
Blur can also be used to blur what is behind your titlebar if your decorations are transparent. In fact, it can blur behind just about any transparent window, even those using a non-standard shape such as Cairo-Clock.

Take It Easy GPU
Blur strives to be easier on the GPU by taking advantage of caching techniques and having many different shaders of variable strength to allow lower end cards to work more smoothly. Blur can even be used on cards without pixel shaders.

For more information on Beryl, head over to Beryl Project.