Re: Window managers ( was Re: newbie question )

[David Chisnall]

On 23 Apr 2009, at 00:28, Yen-Ju Chen wrote:

>  I am also watching a new window manager called i3.
>  It is written in XCB, a supposed replacement for xlib.
>  XCB should be faster than xlib and can use cairo as backend.
>  But it is still at very early stage.

XCB is now very stable and feature-complete.  The documentation is  
somewhat lacking, but because XCB calls corresponds directly to  
protocol requests and the protocol is very well-documented, this is  
not a big issue.  New versions of XLib use XCB internally.

I recently committed my (quite early) work-in-progress ProjectManager  
code to the Étoilé repository.  This will be a compositing window  
manager for the Étoilé environment and is written using XCB.  I have  
tried to separate the policy and mechanism out and, when it is a bit  
more complete, will be splitting that code out into an XCBKit, with  
the aim of being able to use it in GNUstep back ends.  It can already  
integrate with an NSRunLoop and deliver XCB events as messages in a  
run loop, so it should be very easy to write something that turns  
these into NSEvents.  I hope to spend some time on this before and at  
the hackathon.

David