Introduction

The X protocol C-language Binding (XCB) is a replacement for Xlib featuring a small footprint, latency hiding, direct access to the protocol, improved threading support, and extensibility.

News

We're planning an XCB Workshop for anyone interested in XCB's development, with travel sponsorship available from the X.org Foundation. Help us pick a date and agenda!

Download

• You can obtain released versions of XCB from http://xcb.freedesktop.org/dist.
• Follow the instructions from the developer's guide to build, except that you can use released versions of the dependencies, and you don't need git, automake, autoconf, or libtool.

Development

• If you wish to work on XCB, please read the developer's guide.
• Mailing list: Discussion of XCB and Xlib/XCB is through the XCB mailing list.
• IRC: XCB developers also hang out on IRC, and have occasional meetings.
• Of course, there's still a lot to do .

Documentation

• The XCB API is documented. There is also a tutorial and some random notes.
• People wanting to implement higher level applications can use xcb-util.
• XCB is built atop an XML description of the X core protocol and common extension protocols called XML/XCB. This protocol can be used in other interesting ways. Documentation of the X Window System protocol is also available at X.org's website, and can be used in combination with XCB documentation as XCB functions largely reflect the protocol.
• To aid in porting applications, you can configure Xlib to use XCB for the transport layer. We call this Xlib/XCB.
• There is automatically-generated documentation for the XCB protocol bindings.
• The Windows (32 bit) port of XCB will be merged into the main code base soon. You can read more on that here.

Miscellaneous

The XCB project has a long history, during which it has produced many academic publications. Various projects have adopted XCB.