X11: How to delay repainting until all events are processed?

Question

I\'m writing a program that has an X11/Xlib interface, and my event processing loop looks like this:

while (XNextEvent(display, &ev) >= 0) {
    switc         


        

Answer 1

Try something like the following (not actually tested):

while (TRUE) {
  if (XPending(display) || !pendingRedraws) {
    // if an event is pending, fetch it and process it
    // otherwise, we have neither events nor pending redraws, so we can
    // safely block on the event queue
    XNextEvent (display, &ev);
    if (isExposeEvent(&ev)) {
      pendingRedraws = TRUE;
    }
    else {
      processEvent(&ev);
    }
  }
  else {
    // we must have a pending redraw
    redraw();
    pendingRedraws = FALSE;
  }
}

It could be beneficial to wait for 10 ms or so before doing the redraw. Unfortunately the raw Xlib has no interface for timers. You need a higher-level toolkit for that (all toolkits including Xt have some kind of timer interface), or work directly with the underlying socket of the X11 connection.