Xlib

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Xlib

Developer(s)	X.Org Foundation
Initial release	~1985 [citation needed]
Stable release	1.8.9[1]  / 5 April 2024; 2 months ago (5 April 2024)
Repository	gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libx11
Written in	C
Type	Library
Website	www.x.org, documentation: www.x.org/releases/current/doc/libX11/libX11/libX11.html

Xlib (also known as libX11) is an X Window System protocol client library written in the C programming language. It contains functions for interacting with an X server. These functions allow programmers to write programs without knowing the details of the X protocol.

Few applications use Xlib directly; rather, they employ other libraries that use Xlib functions to provide widget toolkits:

• X Toolkit Intrinsics (Xt)
• Athena widget set (Xaw)
• Motif
• FLTK
• GTK
• Qt (X11 version)
• Tk
• SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer)
• SFML (Simple and Fast Multimedia Library)

Xlib appeared around 1985,^{[citation needed]} and is used in GUIs for many Unix-like operating systems. A re-implementation of Xlib was introduced in 2007 using XCB.^[2]