liblx

Warning

This document is still very preliminary. It is likely to be incomplete and/or incorrect and is very likely to change.

What is liblx?

liblx is an API to The X Window System, implementing the client side of the protocol spoken between clients and servers. It sits in the software stack at the same place as Xlib and xcb. (If you want you could think of it as a competitor to them. I prefer to think of them as complementary alternatives rather than competitors; their ideal use cases are different.)

Where does liblx work?

At this writing, 2025-11-13, the only machines I know it works on are my own. Its native home is NetBSD, but I expect it to be an easy-to-trivial port to make it work anywhere libaio and possibly libavl work. (libavl only if the application uses block function orders; see the libaio documentation. liblx itself does not need it.)

So what does liblx-using code look like?

I've written some example programs.

• xwarp.c: A program to warp the pointer to a position specified on the command line.
• delwin.c: A command-line program to generate WM_DELETE_WINDOW requests.

I've got more. These ones, though, I haven't gone through and commented, so they are drastically under-documented. As I get them commented, I'll move them to the list above.

• sgf A directory containing an SGF replayer. It's fairly rudimentary at present.

Where can I find more doc?

I have not yet even started writing a full manpage (or manpages). At the moment, documentation takes two forms:

• Comments in lx.h, which you can find in my unpacked-git-repos space here;
• Text doc files, which exist in my unpacked-git-repos space here.

How do I get liblx?

My primary distribution mechanism is a world-clonable git repo: git://git.rodents-montreal.org/liblx is the thing to clone. There's also the unpacked view of the git repo; see here.

Almost all these pages—all, I think—are 100% hand-coded.