All,

If you think unix ends without x, just move along, nothing to see here. Otherwise, I thought I would share the subject of my latest post and a link with those of you interested in such things.

Recently, I've been tooling around trying to wrap my head around x windows and wanted to give programming it a shot at the xlib level... on my mac, if possible. So, I bought a copy of Adrian Nye's Xlib Programming Manual for Version 11 R4/R5, aka Volume One of The Definitive Guides to the X Window System, published, get this... 30+ years ago, in 1992 :) and started reading like a madman. As usual, this was an example of great technical writing from the prior millenium, something rarely found today.

Anyway, I hunted up the source code examples as published, unpacked them, did a few environmental things to my mac, and built my first xlib application from that source. A few tweaks to my XQuartz configuration and I was running the application in twm on my mac, with a root window.

To read about it and see it in all of its glory, check it out here:

https://decuser.github.io/operating-systems/mojave/x-windows/2023/01/24/x-windows-dev-on-mac.html

The same sort of setup works with Linux, FreeBSD, or my latest environment DragonFly BSD. It's not the environment that I find interesting, but rather the X Window System itself, but this is my way of entering into that world. If you are interested in running X Windows, not as an integrated system on your mac (where x apps run in aqua windows), but with a 'regular' window manager, and you haven't figured out how, this is one way.

On the provocateur front - is X part of unix? I mean this in oh so many nuanced ways, so read into it as you will. I would contend, torpedoes be damned, that it is :).

Will