Topic summary
Xlib
Xlib (also known as libX11) is an X Window System protocol client library written in the C programming language. It contains functions for interacting with an X server. These functions allow programmers to write programs without knowing the details of the X protocol.
Few applications use Xlib directly; rather, they employ other libraries that use Xlib functions to provide widget toolkits:
- X Toolkit Intrinsics (Xt)
- Athena widget set (Xaw)
- Motif
- FLTK
- GTK
- Qt (X11 version)
- Tk
- SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer)
- SFML (Simple and Fast Multimedia Library)
Xlib, which was first publicly released in September 1985, is used in GUIs for many Unix-likeoperating systems. A re-implementation of Xlib was introduced in 2007 using XCB.