xgbutil

Thread Safety

xgbutil is designed to be thread-safe. While the underlying X event loop in the xevent package is implemented sequentially, you can safely assume xgbutil itself is thread-safe.

Concurrency Model

By default, the library follows a sequential model. The complexity of making the main event loop generally concurrent is avoided by letting the user spawn concurrent code at their own discretion. The recommended pattern is to keep the main event loop sequential and use Go's concurrency primitives for any parallel tasks.

To install the xgbutil library in your Go project, use the go get command.

go get github.com/BurntSushi/xgbutil

The write-events script is a Python program used to automate the generation of Go source files within the xevent package. It generates types_auto.go and callbacks.go, which contain the boilerplate code required for X event definitions in the core protocol. This script is essential when adding support for new X extensions (such as RandR) that require new event definitions.

Note: This script is typically invoked automatically via make from the xgbutil root directory during the development process.

# Typically run via make in the root directory
make

You can quickly test the library by installing and running the window-name-sizes example. This tool outputs a list of names and geometries (including window manager decorations) for all top-level windows, provided your window manager supports basic EWMH properties.

go get github.com/BurntSushi/xgbutil/_examples/window-name-sizes
"$GOPATH"/bin/window-name-sizes

The primary dependency for xgbutil is the XGB project.

If you are using the xgraphics packages within xgbutil, you will also require the following dependencies:

• graphics-go
• freetype-go