VIvinceguidry·Jul 17, 2026
Vidar wrote one in pure Ruby.
https://github.com/vidarh/ruby-x11
In Frame – Linux X server in Assemblyvidarh
ruby-x11
Ruby2023–2026
vidarh / ruby-x11
ruby-x11
Pure Ruby implementation of the X Window System Protocol
2Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
10GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Pure Ruby implementation of the X Window System Protocol
GitHub
Where it is used
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What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
- vidarh/rubyterm · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year6 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2023-11-11 13:10:08 UTC to 2026-07-17 17:09:38 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
6 sourcesFor the glyph regeneration, individual characters is more than fast enough - TrueType is actually quite simple to rasterize [1] (if you ignore things like hinting, which you increasingly might as well on 4k displays etc.; also: if you ignore emojis, which involve an embedded subset of SVG in the font file... eww). It's really just if you have a screenful of previously unseen glyphs you'd get a very brief slowdown. You could warm the cache if you wanted, but in practice I can increase/decrease the fontsize with a screenful of text in my terminal without it being slow enough to be worth optimizing more.
> I had forgotten or didn't know that you'd also written a pure Ruby replacement for Xlib!
That one is not all me. I've just filled in a bunch of blanks[2], mostly by specifying more packets after the original maintainer disappeared. I keep
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meaning to simplify it, as while it works well, I find it unnecessarily verbose. I'm also tempted to bite the bullet and write the code to auto-generate the packet handling from the XML files used for XCB.
I think there's large parts of X11 that are broken, but the more I'm looking at my stack, and how little modern X clients use of X, the more tempted I am to try to write an X server as well, and see how much cruft I could strip away if I just implement what is needed to run the clients I care about (you could always run Xvnc or Xephyr or similar if you want to run some other app).
That would make it plausible to then separate the rendering backend and the X protocol implementation, and toy with simpler/cleaner protocols...
[1] https://github.com/vidarh/skrift
[2] https://github.com/vidarh/ruby-x11
My X11 window manager is pure Ruby: https://github.com/vidarh/rubywm
That was posted to HN a while back. It's a minimalist tiling wm.
My file manager is (very simplistic, I do most of my actual file management from the shell - it's in effect mostly a desktop launcher) Ruby
It, as well as my desktop switcher (also Ruby) depends on pure Ruby X11 bindings, and a pure Ruby TrueType font renderer:
https://github.com/vidarh/skrift
https://github.com/vidarh/skrift-x11
https://github.com/vidarh/ruby-x11
So does my Ruby terminal (what's on Github is nothing like the full version, which I will package up and push one of these days).
My editor is also pure Ruby, using Rouge (Ruby; not mine) for syntax highlighting. That also needs a major update on Github - what's there probably won't even run for others because my personal "ecosystem" on my
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system is full of helpers and these things are written to be as minimalist as possible so e.g. my editors "file open" dialog is a 2-3 line wrapper around dmenu.
And I've just replaced my shell with Ruby - but that's just for interactive use, so it's very tiny.
As you can see if you dig into my code and then look at the X protocol implementation [1], the (incomplete) pure Ruby X11 binding takes up more lines of code than the WM. I was tempted to write the code to generate it from the XML spec, but a lot of the scaffolding for the current X11 binding predated my own work and it seemed like it'd be more and more painful work to write the generator than bite the bullet and do it manually (I don't expect to/care about supporting the whole protocol anyway). So a PHP version would be totally viable, just tedious.
[1] https://github.com/vidarh/ruby-x11
In RubyWM – an X11 window manager in pure RubyI've put plenty of half-baked stuff out there over the years, so that doesn't really worry me. More that at the moment if you try to copy any of it the github repos are all at different stages of not quite up to date, and APIs are in flux, and you're just really likely to have a bad time trying to get anything to work.
I think the real starting point for me is going to be to clean up PureX11 a bit more so the API is at least somewhat cohesive, and then push the WM as it's working enough that it's been my only wm for a few weeks (it does have significant quirks still, but with somewhat minor cleanups it's a decent starting point to play with), and then the terminal as it's fairly freestanding, then some of the file management tools, toolbar, popup menu etc., then lastly my editor. The editor has by far changed most from the version on Gith
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ub and is also most likely to cause problems for others, so that might take a bit of time, not least because I'm in the middle of a fairly significant overhaul of the way the views and models works.
Here's some of what is out there, though:
* Skrift: This is a Ruby port of libschrift, a TTF font renderer. It's heavily cut down, and currently stands at about 680 lines of code. I intended to tidy up the API as it's still a bit messy after my rewrite: https://github.com/vidarh/skrift
* X11 bindings for Skrift: https://github.com/vidarh/skrift-x11 - these are messy, and I have significant updates to them (including basic fontset support and a mechanism for pixel-perfect boxdrawing characters at any reasonable scale) that have not yet been pushed: https://github.com/vidarh/skrift-x11
* Pure-X11: This is a form and significant overhaul of pure X11 client bindings for Ruby (as in not Xlib or XCB needed): https://github.com/vidarh/ruby-x11 - it's not terribly out of date, but it's a bit in flux as I don't like the initial mechanism, used for the protocol and so I'm thinking about how to trim it down and make it easier to use.
* This is the starting point for my terminal. My terminal is nothing like that any more, but this is the repo that will get all the updates, eventually: https://github.com/vidarh/rubyterm - this initial prototype used a C extension and server-side fonts, while the current version uses Pure-X11 and Skrift
* This was the very first version of my WM I used, a few hours into the switch (from bspwm). It's a straight port from TinyWM. My current one has tiling and some EWMH support and multiple desktops and adds about 700 lines of code - it'll start appearing on Github soon: https://gist.github.com/vidarh/1cdbfcdf3cfd8d25a247243963e55...
* This is a script I used to feed into a 9menu style popup menu script from my file manager to generate folder-contextual actions based on the folder contents: https://gist.github.com/vidarh/323204137de5293bfe216ec751646... -- the current version is quite a bit slicker and will eventually show up
* This is a very dated and broken version of my editor, and odds are you'll struggle to get it to work at all, as it depends on various helper scripts that are not yet packaged up, as have been massive updated since that version; I'm hoping to maybe bring the repo a bit more up to date over the holidays: https://github.com/vidarh/re
* This is a gem that handles the input processing: https://github.com/vidarh/termcontroller
* This does keyboard mapping from symbols from termcontroller to higher level user-defined sequences:
https://github.com/vidarh/keyboard_map
* This is layered on top of Rouge (which I use for syntax highlighting), to load GTK sourceview themes into Rouge: https://github.com/vidarh/rouge-gtk_theme_loader
No current version, but I'm preparing it. But actually, to see a really ridiculously minimalist start, this was my starting point, which used a tiny C extension to do the X rendering (though it optimistically included a dummy class intended to be the start for the Ruby X backend). It's awfully limited, and awfully broken, but it shows how little it takes to be able to start writing:
https://github.com/vidarh/rubyterm
It's totally useless for anything other that testing or expanding on, but it was the starting point for the terminal I now run every day, and I'll be updating that repo as I clean up my current version at some point.
The current version uses this for a pure Ruby (no Xlib) X11 client implementation:
https://github.com/vidarh/ruby-x11
And this pure-Ruby TrueType font renderer (I did the Ruby conversion; the C code it's based on
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was not mine, and is a beautiful example of compact C - look up libschrift) as I got tired of using the bitmap fonts and didn't want to add a FreeType dependency (the renderer is ~500 lines of code):
https://github.com/vidarh/skrift