X Window System Architecture Overview HOWTO
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# 5. Client Applications

Let's focus on the client programs for a moment. Imagine you wanted to write a client program from scratch, using only the facilities provided by X. You'd quickly find that Xlib is pretty spartan, and that doing things like putting buttons on screen, text, or nice controls (scrollbars, radio boxes) for the users, is terribly complicated.

Luckily, someone else went to the trouble of programming these controls and giving them to us in a usable form; a library. These controls are usually known as "widgets" and of course, the library is a "widget library". Then I just have to call a function from this library with some parameters and have a button on-screen. Examples of widgets include menus, buttons, radio buttons, scrollbars, and canvases.

A "canvas" is an interesting kind of widget, because it's basically a sub-area within the client where i can draw stuff. Understandably, since I shouldn't use Xlib directly, because that would interfere with the widget library, the library itself gives a way to draw arbitrary graphics within the canvas widget.

Since the widget library is the one actually drawing the elements on-screen, as well as interpreting user's actions into input, the library used is largely responsible for each client's aspect and behavior. From a developer's point of view, a widget library also has a certain API (set of functions), and that might define which widget library i'll want to use.

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Window Managers |  | Widget Libraries or toolkits