Re: A few GDK questions

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Sat, 2009-02-21 at 14:50 -0500, Michael B. Trausch wrote:

> 
> There seem to be those that are of the mindset "If you can use Xlib for
> a problem, why not just use GDK?" which is what led me to believe that
> it might be suitable for my purposes.  But if GDK only lets you "see"
> things that the application created or has registered, and can't
> operate in a mode where it works with the entire windowing system as a
> whole, that could be problematic for me.  I am going to wager a guess
> that the restriction on things like selections also applies to asking
> for the children of the root window, when asking GDK, and other things
> like that.

Gdk is mainly an abstraction in order to make Gtk+ portable and easier
to write. Its not really designed as something to be used by itself. Its
goal is to support writing applications in Gtk+, not to do lowelevel
things that are possible in X.

Furthermore, the planned move to client side windows[1] in gdk will move
even further from the lowlevel X level you seem to want to use.

I don't know exactly what kind of things you want to do, but there are
imho two possibilites:

* Use xlib only
* Use gdk and xlib (via gdkx.h) in combination

Using xlib seems to be closer to the level you want to work, but using
gdk may make programming easier as it does some things for you. However,
you're gonna have to learn a lot of how gdk works so you can mix it well
with xlib calls.

[1] http://live.gnome.org/GTK%2B/ClientSideWindows