Running X

User documentation contains documentation for running the X server and basic X clients, as well as protocol specifications and basic client programming documentation.

Developing X applications

Rather than develop directly for X, we recommend you use a toolkit such as GTK+ or Qt. There are many other popular toolkits, some special-purpose, such as Clutter and Enlightenment/EFL.

For low-level X development, XCB, the X C Bindings provide a clean low-level protocol binding. Its older cousin Xlib (or libX11), is not recommended for new development, but is still very widely used. Xt is a similarly deprecated library for building toolkits. Documentation for Xlib and Xt is available.

Protocol documentation, man pages, etc. is available at: https://www.x.org/releases/current/doc/index.html

Downloading, running, and developing X.Org code

The development documentation describes how to download and build the X.Org code (including the X server and drivers), and rough notes on their internals.

The X New Developer’s Guide attempts to be a gentle introduction to how the entire stack is put together and how some of the pieces work.