CLX

CLX is to Common Lisp as Xlib is to C - it provides low-level X calls on top of which a Graphics Toolkit can be based. See McCLIM for the de-facto higher-level toolkit, also see Garnet, CLUE and CLIO for alternatives.

The CLX package as found in the X Consortium contrib archive is considerably out of date as various Lisp implementors have independently ported CLX to their own platforms, fixing bugs and, in some cases, adding features in the process.

"telent CLX" (working title, also known as portable-clx) is used in SBCL and also forms the basis of the OpenMCL and ECL CLX packages. As of 0.7.3 it additionally supports Allegro CL. It includes Unix-domain socket support, SHAPE, XRENDER, XFREE86-VIDMODE extensions, authorization fixes for ssh-forwarded connections, and many other bugfixes and performance improvements. Usually tested against the latest released SBCL.
```
darcs get http://common-lisp.net/~crhodes/clx # patches merged by Christophe
          http://verisons.telent.net/clx # version from which releases are made -- this seems to be a broken link
          http://monday-monkey.com/repos/clx/ # OpenMCL tree by bryan o'connor?
```
Download ASDF package from http://ftp.linux.org.uk/pub/lisp/sbcl/clx_0.7.3.tar.gz
(link fixed)
CLX for CMUCL is available from CMUCL download sites in the extra package: see the Download instructions
CLISP comes with two implementations of CLX - the original MIT-CLX and NEW-CLX which is faster and has some extensions.
Remark: now telent-clx from Christophe Rhodes experimental tree (darcs get http://common-lisp.net/~crhodes/clx) also works with CLISP. But these patches aren't maintained by Christophe!
LispWorks - Barry Wilkes ported the MIT R5.02 sources to LispWorks for Linux - http://www.bew.org.uk/Lisp/index.html. Other UNIX ports of LispWorks have a version of CLX supported by Xanalys.
OpenMCL (based on telent CLX) at ftp://clozure.com/pub/CLX/
CLX has been part of Allegro Common Lisp since it was called Extended Common Lisp. You can browse the version distributed with Allegro CL here; it appears to be the same as the MIT sources, featurewise.

In clocc (at sourceforge) there is a CLX implementation for CLISP, ACL, LWL?, CMUCL, SBCL using clocc-port, but (as of 2003.08.28) this is stale at least as compared to the telent tree: if there's a telent-derived CLX for your Lisp, you're better off using that.

The CLX Manual is available in HTML and texinfo.

Supported X11 extensions

XRENDER by Gilbert Baumann (basically done in the telent tree)
XSHAPE and XFREE86-VIDMODE in the telent tree
GLX (experimental) and DPMS (also in the telent tree)
BIG-REQUESTS (work begun in Christophe's darcs repository)
Some XSM work has been done in Eclipse; e.g.: eclipse/lib/sm/ common-lisp.net CVSWeb entry

Opportunities to contribute

Adding more effective declarations
Update the CLX Manual.
Adding documentation strings to functions (mostly just converting existing good comments to strings).
Better i18n
Support for the MITSHM extension
Use XmlXcb (XML description of the X protocol as used by XCB) as basis.

ssh-forwarded connections

The standard CLX function OPEN-DISPLAY doesn't correctly extract the display number from the DISPLAY environment variable. This is a problem when using CLX on an ssh-forwarded X11 session, as ssh typically uses display number 10+n. Additionally, CLX in its MIT guise doesn't handle xauth very well, requiring the xhost blunt instrument before it'll put up a window on such a display. This is handled correctly in CMUCL CLX (use EXT:OPEN-CLX-DISPLAY) and in telent CLX (XLIB:OPEN-DEFAULT-DISPLAY). See CMUCL Hints for more information.

Perhaps you want to have a look at the source code of Acclaim as it directly uses CLX without any layer in between to display the rendered slides on screen.

Pages in this topic: clfswm CLIO CLUE CLX Manual Eclipse Garnet portable-clx portable-clx-devel SLIK xlyb

Also linked from: Acclaim Alan Crowe clisp clSET CLX Grapher CMUCL Hints Current recommended libraries ECL Fractal hacks ftp.linux.org.uk Graphics Toolkit Hemlock Less Recent Changes Logo-to-lisp McCLIM MorphiCL OpenGL Bindings OpenMCL Picasso Planet of the Feebs Simple 3D viewing Steeldump Suggested Programming Projects win32 X11 XIT

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