Question

I’m wanting to port a windows program I’m working on to linux. It entirely uses d3d11 to draw it output so I’ll need to write an opengl alternative. That’s fine. But I need to create a window and a few basic operations like resizing, setting fullscreen, getting notified of user keyboard and mouse input, and close and resize notification.

I won’t require any child windows, or controls as everything is drawn by opengl.

So what is an appropriate way to do this? I looked at raw Xlib but it seems quite low level. I’m prepared to learn it but all the examples seem really old so I’m not sure if it’s still the best way, plus will doing that work with whatever environment the user had (kde, gnome etc…)?

I could use qt, kde etc, but they are far, far more sophisiticated than I need for this so introduce a large dependency that I’d rather avoid if possible.

So, is Xlib an appropriate technology for this, or is there some other lightweight library I’m not aware of?

Answer 1

Look at SDL. It’s pretty much the standard choice for applications like yours.