Visuals are a very important concept that is often overlooked. Roughly, a visual defines the memory representation that a piece of hardware uses to store the contents of an image. X supports different kinds of visuals to suit the different kinds of hardware out there.
Some of this information comes from Federico Mena's excellent "X Concepts" document from http://www.nuclecu.unam.mx/~federico/docs/x-concepts.
| Member Name | Description |
|---|---|
| StaticGray | Static gray visuals are those in which you cannot change the gray intensities of the hardware. |
| Grayscale | Grayscale visuals are used for displays that use a single channel of color information. |
| StaticColor | An indexed color visual, where colors can not be changed. |
| PseudoColor | An indexed color visual, where colors can change. |
| TrueColor | True color visuals use the exact RGB values you specified for a pixel |
| DirectColor | DirectColor visuals use RGB encoding, with a correction palette. |