Oh, I absolutely don't judge you for those. Frankly part of the reason I went for a pure Ruby version instead of xlib was that the Xlib bindings for Ruby are also in an awful state, and someone else had done enough of the job on the pure Ruby bindings that it felt like it was doable incrementally as I needed various calls and not much worse than wrapping Xlib or xcb.

I like that there are no other dependencies, but I'd have sacrificed that if it was sufficiently much easier than the route I ended up taking (e.g. my terminal did start out linking to Xlib and using a tiny C extension; it's since been ripped out in favour of the pure Ruby bindings, since why not now that it's available, but it was a perfectly ok solution to start with).