My experience doing relatively low level X stuff in Go

October 17, 2014

Today I wound up needing a program that spoke the current Firefox remote control protocol instead of the old -remote based protocol that Firefox Nightly just removed. I had my choice between either adding a bunch of buffer mangling to a very old C program that already did basically all of the X stuff necessary or trying to do low-level X things from a Go program. The latter seemed much more interesting and so it's what I did.

(The old protocol was pretty simple but the new one involves a bunch of annoying buffer packing.)

Remote controlling Firefox is done through X properties, which is a relatively low level part of the X protocol (well below the usual level of GUIs and toolkits like GTK and Qt). You aren't making windows or drawing anything; instead you're grubbing around in window trees and getting obscure events from other people's windows. Fortunately Go has low level bindings for X in the form of Andrew Gallant's X Go Binding and his xgbutil packages for them (note that the XGB documentation you really want to read is for xgb/xproto). Use of these can be a little bit obscure so it very much helped me to read several examples (for both xgb and xgbutil).

All told the whole experience was pretty painless. Most of the stumbling blocks I ran into were because I don't really know X programming and because I was effectively translating from an older X API (Xlib) that my original C program was using to XCB, which is what XGB's API is based on. This involved a certain amount of working out what old functions that the old code was calling actually did and then figuring out how to translate them into XGB and xgbutil stuff (mostly the latter, because xgbutil puts a nice veneer over a lot of painstaking protocol bits).

(I was especially pleased that my Go code for the annoying buffer packing worked the first time. It was also pretty easy and obvious to write.)

One of the nice little things about using Go for this is that XGB turns out to be a pure Go binding, which means it can be freely cross compiled. So now I can theoretically do Firefox remote control from essentially any machine I remotely log into around here. Someday I may have a use for this, perhaps for some annoying system management program that insists on spawning something to show me links.

(Cross machine remote control matters to me because I read my email on a remote machine with a graphical program, and of course I want to click on links there and have them open in my workstation's main Firefox.)

Interested parties who want either a functional and reasonably commented example of doing this sort of stuff in Go or a program to do lightweight remote control of Unix Firefox can take a look at the ffox-remote repo. As a bonus I have written down in comments what I now know about the actual Firefox remote control protocol itself.

Written on 17 October 2014.
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Last modified: Fri Oct 17 00:54:09 2014
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