Creating window application in pure c on mac osx

Question

I\'m creating an application in pure C on Mac OSX. What I want is to create window in witch my app will be stored.

Preferably I want it to be pure C solution, but if

Answer 1

I remember seeing this question about a year ago, back when I so desperately wished I could open up a d*** window, googling for days and only finding the type of answers you see above this post.

I was reading up on the operating system the Mac is built on - Berkley Software Distribution. http://codex.cs.yale.edu/avi/os-book/OS9/appendices-dir/a.pdf Where on page 17 the phrase "...X Windowing System developed at MIT" hit me and I remembered how I couldn't open up a window and how pissed I was about that, and I thought maybe this was finally the solution!

I googled "BSD X Window Programming" and stumbled my way into finally getting a window open in pure C.

I just discovered it so I'm not a master yet but look at this link https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/X_Window_Programming/Xlib and go to the example, make sure to follow the comments at the top for how to compile with the X11 library (you can ignore the -Wall and -O commands as long as you have the -lX11).

If you can't compile, if it can't find the header files, you'll need to help it find the header files.

There might be a couple different places that the X11 includes could be on your system. More than likely you'll find it in /opt/X11/include which will have all the definitions of the headers you'll need.

You could include the full path in your C programs such as:

#include "/opt/X11/include/X11/Xlib.h"

But we want it to look like this #include So you could add this switch to GCC when you compile -I /opt/X11/include

Or go to your .profile or .bashrc or .bash_profile in your home directory and add:

export C_INCLUDE_PATH="$C_INCLUDE_PATH:/opt/X11/include"
/*

Simple Xlib application drawing a box in a window.

*/

From the wiki:

#include
#include
#include // prevents error for exit on line   18 when compiling with gcc
int main() {
  Display *d;
  int s;
  Window w;
  XEvent e;

                    /* open connection with the server */
  d=XOpenDisplay(NULL);
  if(d==NULL) {
    printf("Cannot open display\n");
    exit(1);
  }
  s=DefaultScreen(d);

                    /* create window */
  w=XCreateSimpleWindow(d, RootWindow(d, s), 10, 10, 100, 100, 1,
                     BlackPixel(d, s), WhitePixel(d, s));

  // Process Window Close Event through event handler so      XNextEvent does Not fail
  Atom delWindow = XInternAtom( d, "WM_DELETE_WINDOW", 0 );
  XSetWMProtocols(d , w, &delWindow, 1);

                    /* select kind of events we are interested in */
  XSelectInput(d, w, ExposureMask | KeyPressMask);

                    /* map (show) the window */
  XMapWindow(d, w);

                    /* event loop */
  while(1) {
    XNextEvent(d, &e);
                    /* draw or redraw the window */
    if(e.type==Expose) {
      XFillRectangle(d, w, DefaultGC(d, s), 20, 20, 10, 10);
    }
                    /* exit on key press */
    if(e.type==KeyPress)
      break;

    // Handle Windows Close Event
    if(e.type==ClientMessage)
       break;
  }

                    /* destroy our window */
  XDestroyWindow(d, w);

                    /* close connection to server */
  XCloseDisplay(d);

  return 0;
}

Compile:

 gcc -O2 -Wall -o test test.c -L /usr/X11R6/lib -lX11 -lm