x11rb VS pgwm

xdotool worked ... but I didn't want to depend on external command-line tools, so I decided to look for X11 bindings for Rust. The best library I could find was x11rb. It had very little documentation and almost no one used it (it was difficult to find people who could help me with it). Fortunately, it had a detailed tutorial. Still, it was a struggle to make things works sometimes.

I'm using x11rb, X11 Rust Bindings. I modified some code from this tutorial so that I'm listening to key presses from parent_win (screen.root) rather than win:

In the end, I decided to use x11rb: https://github.com/psychon/x11rb. This way I don't have to run external commands.

I'm trying to move a window (the GNOME terminal) with x11rb. I followed this tutorial. But the move_window function doesn't move the window.

I'm using x11rb to interact with a window created with gtk-rs. window_id is the ID of the window created with gtk-rs. window_id_2 is the ID of the window created with x11rb (for testing purposes).

I also checked x11rb, but I think it's too low level (and too complicated).

There is a comparison page in x11rb but it seems to be outdated w.r.t rust-xcb and the unsafe claims, so would appreciate other perspectives.

Do you have a source for that or any specifics on how it "can't handle" the usecases? There's already work in Rust around fully supporting X11 (for example https://github.com/bread-graphics/breadx or https://github.com/psychon/x11rb)

I was thinking about specializing x11rb which is a great library for interfacing with X11, to my specific single threaded use case.

So if firefox is an application you can find you can query the WM_CLASS property, like this. Other applications might not set that and you'd have to use some other property or information to deduce that this given window(which is just a u32) is actually applicationA. A tip is to start the application, use xprop and see what properties it sets. call_wrapper.rs contains a lot of code about querying different properties. The x11rb example simple_window.rs has a few examples of the other side of that showing how an application can set its on properties.

Ps. I don't at all endorse using tiny-std, I think it's correct but I wouldn't be surprised if some nasty bugs are hiding somewhere in there. Although I do use it for my WM pgwm which can now be build on stable, assuming you're running Linux with io-uring, a wrote a bit about that change here but didn't post about it then. The main benefit of tiny-std being tiny binaries that link statically.

If you want to check out the WM, that can be found here. If you want to check out tiny-std, that's here. As previously mentioned, there's a write-up on all of that here.

So if firefox is an application you can find you can query the WM_CLASS property, like this. Other applications might not set that and you'd have to use some other property or information to deduce that this given window(which is just a u32) is actually applicationA. A tip is to start the application, use xprop and see what properties it sets. call_wrapper.rs contains a lot of code about querying different properties. The x11rb example simple_window.rs has a few examples of the other side of that showing how an application can set its on properties.