SGI's migration to X

[Mark Moraes]

>and the only  routine they provide sends the  pixels  over one by one,
>OVER THE NETWORK! so that even when you display  from your own private
>terminal to your own  private screen it  goes...

Not true.  You can build and send the entire image in one go.  See
XPutImage.

>And then there are other little annoying things- like you  cannot tell
>X in advance where  you want your  window to arrive,  the only way  to
>position it is by hand with the mouse.

Also not true.  You can specify where you want the window to go.  At
the application level, most applications will accept the -geometry
option -- at the program level, see XSetWMNormalHints.

The X manuals are, um, terse.  They're reference manuals.  There are
several tutorial manuals on the market now.  You may find reading those
manuals quicker than asking the people at the X Consortium.  From the
X Bibliography Ken Lee posts periodically to comp.windows.x, my
favourites are:

 |  Jones, Oliver, Introduction to the X Window System, Prentice-Hall, 1988.
 |       ISBN 0-13-499997-5. An excellent introduction to programming with
 |       Xlib.  Written with the programmer in mind, this book includes many
 |       practical tips that are not found anywhere else. This book is not as
 |       broad as the O'Reilly Xlib tutorial and doesn't offer as many examples
 |       as the Johnson & Reichard book, but Jones is probably the most experi-
 |       enced X programmer of this group and this shows in the quality and
 |       depth of the material in the book. Originally written for X11R1, re-
 |       cent printings have included corrections and additions.  The sixth
 |       printing may have X11R4 material.
 |
 |  Young, Douglas A., X Window Systems Programming and Applications With Xt,
 |       Prentice-Hall, 1989.  ISBN 0-13-972167-3. The first, and still one of
 |       the best, tutorial on programming with the X Toolkit intrinsics. Both
 |       using existing widgets and writing your own widgets are covered. Exam-
 |       ples in this book use the HP widget set, available in the contrib sec-
 |       tion of the X distribution. A Motif version of this book is also
 |       available.


	Mark.