In practice, this different manifests itself most prominently in how the two libraries handle the fundamental asynchronous nature of X’s client-server architecture. The two libraries have very different philosophies: whereas Xlib tries to hide the X protocol behind a friendly C API with lots of bells and whistles, XCB directly exposes the plumbing beneath. Xlib, hailing from 1985, was the original X client library, and was the only official X client library until the introduction of XCB in 2001. There are two official C libraries for X: Xlib and XCB. We will use C++11 and C++14 features where convenient, so you will need a compatible compiler (GCC 4.9 or higher, or Clang 3.4 or higher) if you want to play with the example source code. Example usage and common patterns abound in the source code of many great window managers written in the past three decades. In addition to books such as the Xlib Programming Manual, documentation can be found in the form of widely available man pages (e.g., try man XOpenDisplay at a terminal). I chose C++ for basic_wm, our example window manager, mainly because the C libraries for X11 are the best documented. a library for communicating with X servers. You can write a window manager in Haskell, Python, Lisp, Go, Java, or any other language that has X bindings, i.e. Introductionīefore we start with the code, let’s go over a couple of basic implementation choices such as language and API. In Part II, we will dig into the dirty details and walk through the code of an example reparenting non-compositing window manager, basic_wm. In Part I of this series, we examined the role of X window managers in a modern Linux/BSD desktop environment, and how they interact with the X server and applications. Window Manager Technical Notes How X Window Managers Work, And How To Write One (Part II).

Windowmanager xda