Re: Another XLibre and/or Wayland subthread

On Wed, 29 Jul 2026 01:50:52 -0000 (UTC), Rich wrote:

> 
> X (the low level wire protocol and xlib the library) was never meant to 
> be a "solution by itself".  It supplies the underlying basic building 
> blocks (windows, intersections between windows, event detection, etc) 
> but leaves the task of converting that into a GUI to the code utilizing 
> it.  Those alphabet soup of toolkits listed all provide various 
> different abstractions over the raw X building blocks so the programmer 
> can request that, e.g a button be placed on screen vs.  having to 
> assemble a button from the underlying primitives.  A similar analogy is 
> that you can "build a cake" from flour, sugar, eggs, flavorings, etc.  
> or you can buy a ready made cake.  Raw X gives you the flour, sugar, 
> eggs, flavorings, and it's up to you to mix them in the right 
> proportion and then bake them for the right time.  Qt or Fltk or Tk let 
> you "buy a ready made cake" instead.
>

That is correct.

There are still some programs that invoke X11 directly.  One example
is my fave text editor/IDE cooledit:

<https://github.com/paulsheer/cooledit>

[~]# ldd /usr/local/bin/cooledit
        linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffff7fc7000)
        libCw.so.1 => /usr/local/lib64/libCw.so.1 (0x00007ffff7eaa000)
        libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libX11.so.6 (0x00007ffff7d67000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x00007ffff7b96000)
        libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libfreetype.so.6 (0x00007ffff7ac2000)
        libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib64/libxcb.so.1 (0x00007ffff7a9a000)
        /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007ffff7fc9000)
        libz.so.1 => /usr/lib64/libz.so.1 (0x00007ffff7a7f000)
        libbz2.so.1 => /usr/lib64/libbz2.so.1 (0x00007ffff7a6c000)
        libpng16.so.16 => /usr/lib64/libpng16.so.16 (0x00007ffff7a1b000)
        libbrotlidec.so.1 => /usr/lib64/libbrotlidec.so.1 (0x00007ffff7a0d000)
        libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libXau.so.6 (0x00007ffff7a09000)
        libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libXdmcp.so.6 (0x00007ffff7a01000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib64/libm.so.6 (0x00007ffff792b000)
        libbrotlicommon.so.1 => /usr/lib64/libbrotlicommon.so.1 (0x00007ffff7909000)


Unfortunately, the mainstream distros have all dropped cooledit
(it's probably not "modern" enough for their tastes).

It has to be built from source.




-- 
Gentoo/LFS: Is there any-fucking-thing else?