Re: Nope
> no-one has talked raw X protocol for years,
Probably almost never, because that is what XLib is for. Applications and toolkits run on top of it. I believe it by default tries to combine consecutive X11 protocol commands.
It is true newer X11 programs do the drawing and font rendering themselves and push pixels, and that really breaks the original idea. I first encountered it with some bloated Java program, that was totally impossible to remote the plain X11 way. The GUI library redrew the entire window for every change (not sure if Java still does this, it was 20 years ago). Using it with VNC server worked. It looks like a X11 server to the application, but sends only the changed pixels (or rather changed blocks) to the remote client.