The X window system

  • Authors:
  • Robert W. Scheifler;Jim Gettys

  • Affiliations:
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge;Digital Equipment Corporation/ and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)
  • Year:
  • 1986

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Abstract

An overview of the X Window System is presented, focusing on the system substrate and the low-level facilities provided to build applications and to manage the desktop. The system provides high-performance, high-level, device-independent graphics. A hierarchy of resizable, overlapping windows allows a wide variety of application and user interfaces to be built easily. Network-transparent access to the display provides an important degree of functional separation, without significantly affecting performance, which is crucial to building applications for a distributed environment. To a reasonable extent, desktop management can be custom-tailored to individual environments, without modifying the base system and typically without affecting applications.