2.1. Opening the Display

To open a connection to the X server that controls a display, use XOpenDisplay().

Syntax


Display *XOpenDisplay(display_name)
      char *display_name;

Arguments

display_name

Specifies the hardware display name, which determines the display and communications domain to be used. On a POSIX-conformant system, if the display_name is NULL, it defaults to the value of the DISPLAY environment variable.

Description

The encoding and interpretation of the display name is implementation dependent. Strings in the Host Portable Character Encoding are supported; support for other characters is implementation dependent. On POSIX-conformant systems, the display name or DISPLAY environment variable can be a string in the format:


	hostname:number.screen_number

hostname Specifies the name of the host machine on which the display is physically attached. You follow the hostname with either a single colon (:) or a double colon (::).
number Specifies the number of the display server on that host machine. You may optionally follow this display number with a period (.). A single CPU can have more than one display. Multiple displays are usually numbered starting with zero.
screen_number Specifies the screen to be used on that server. Multiple screens can be controlled by a single X server. The screen_number sets an internal variable that can be accessed by using the DefaultScreen() macro or the XDefaultScreen() function if you are using languages other than C (see "Display Macros").

For example, the following would specify screen 1 of display 0 on the machine named ``dual-headed'':

dual-headed:0.1

The XOpenDisplay() function returns a Display structure that serves as the connection to the X server and that contains all the information about that X server. XOpenDisplay() connects your application to the X server through TCP or DECnet communications protocols, or through some local inter-process communication protocol. If the hostname is a host machine name and a single colon (:) separates the hostname and display number, XOpenDisplay() connects using TCP streams. If the hostname is not specified, Xlib uses whatever it believes is the fastest transport. If the hostname is a host machine name and a double colon (::) separates the hostname and display number, XOpenDisplay() connects using DECnet. A single X server can support any or all of these transport mechanisms simultaneously. A particular Xlib implementation can support many more of these transport mechanisms.

If successful, XOpenDisplay() returns a pointer to a Display structure, which is defined in X11/Xlib.h. If XOpenDisplay() does not succeed, it returns NULL. After a successful call to XOpenDisplay() all of the screens in the display can be used by the client. The screen number specified in the display_name argument is returned by the DefaultScreen() macro (or the XDefaultScreen() function). You can access elements of the Display and Screen structures only by using the information macros or functions. For information about using macros and functions to obtain information from the Display structure, see Display Macros.

X servers may implement various types of access control mechanisms (see "Controlling Host Access").

Next: Obtaining Information about the Display, Image Formats, or Screens

Christophe Tronche, ch@tronche.com

hostname	Specifies the name of the host machine on which the display is physically attached. You follow the hostname with either a single colon (:) or a double colon (::).
number	Specifies the number of the display server on that host machine. You may optionally follow this display number with a period (.). A single CPU can have more than one display. Multiple displays are usually numbered starting with zero.
screen_number	Specifies the screen to be used on that server. Multiple screens can be controlled by a single X server. The screen_number sets an internal variable that can be accessed by using the DefaultScreen() macro or the XDefaultScreen() function if you are using languages other than C (see "Display Macros").