This repo holds a few X11 experiments (or will shortly) comparing XCB and Xlib. I'm really interested in building some automation tools for X11, but I have to get a handle on how the system works first.

I built this with Fedora 27. I'd eventually like to throw together some expanded RPM-centric instructions and make this work in the Debian world, but that's really far out.

You'll first need X11. You can generally find it via libX11. For active development, some of the protocol headers are very, very useful.

$ sudo dnf install -y 'libX11*'{,-devel}
$ sudo dnf install -y xorg-x11-proto-devel

X11 also has a ton of hardware-specific packages, which makes simple, catchall (and overkill) installations like this hard:

$ sudo dnf install --skip-broken 'xorg-x11-*'{,-devel}

If you'll notice, I left out -y; that will install a ton of cruft you might not need.

I spent a considerable amount of time looking around for a solid and dependable Python port. There are some great repos out there, but, like Xlib, they're opinionated, outdated, and not feature-complete. Rather than try to grok someone else's spin on Xlib, I just rolled my own via ctypes. To be fair, I have no idea what I'm doing, which is probably why I couldn't understand the other Python Xlib libraries.

You'll first need XCB. You can generally find it via libxcb. There's a good chance there are also some ancillary packages you might need. On Fedora, you can get everything with something like this:

$ sudo dnf install -y {libxcb,'xcb-util-*'}{,-devel}

The official Python project, xpyb, is a nightmare to install, doesn't work with Python 3, and doesn't seem to be under active development. Instead I went with xcffib, a cffi port that works insanely well. I replaced xpyb in a few minutes without any failed tests.