The high level GUI toolkits that I looked at (GTK+ and Qt) were very bloated with features that would not come in handy for my use case, and frankly, they were difficult to use. Doing simple tasks in Xlib was simpler. But I did quickly notice a lot of limitations with Xlib such as no transparent pixels which means no Anti aliasing and the lack of ability to load in True type and Open type fonts. I did come across the Xrender library (also by XOrg) but couldn't find any documentation for it. Also doesn't really help that pretty much any documentation for Xlib is dozens of years old. Which (C) GUI libraries do you have in mind?

> Also doesn't really help that pretty much any documentation for Xlib is dozens of years old.

it hasn't changed in dozens of years! what do you expect? somebody sitting around refreshing graphical design for docs on a library you shouldn't use, so that people feel better about using it? you shouldn't be using it!

> frankly, they were difficult to use

try making a combo box with Xlib.

> Doing simple tasks in Xlib was simpler

pro-tip: simple tasks are simple. worry about how difficult the difficult tasks will be.

I agree; I really dislike GTK+. However, you could use Xt and/or Xaw, which are OK in my opinion (although there are no transparent pixels, etc; but if you need them, then you might possibly draw your own stuff in the document area).

I'll look into Xt and Xaw. Thanks

Cairo may help - https://www.cairographics.org

This looks promising. I'll look into it. Thanks +1