X11::Protocol often is just a simple network socket. You can access the deep underlying handle and wait for input via select - and it is pretty simple. I did that in File::KeePass::Agent in the unix.pm module because I wanted to listen for global events as well as have a local gui running at the same time in the same process. Here is the relevant code snippet:
sub _listen {
my $self = shift;
my $x = $self->x;
$x->event_handler('queue');
# listen to both the x protocol events as well as our local term
require IO::Select;
my $in_fh = ...; # some other handle I'm looking at
my $x_fh = $x->{'connection'}->fh;
$x_fh->autoflush(1);
$in_fh->autoflush(1);
my $sel = IO::Select->new($x_fh, $in_fh);
# handle events as they occur
$self->_init_state(1);
my $i;
while (1) {
my ($fh) = $sel->can_read(10);
next if ! $fh;
if ($fh == $in_fh) {
$self->_handle_term_input($fh) || last;
} else {
$self->read_x_event;
}
}
}
sub read_x_event {
my $self = shift;
my $cb_map = shift || $self->{'global_cb_map'} || die "No global c
+allbacks initialized\n";
my $x = $self->x;
my %event = $x->next_event;
return if ($event{'name'} || '') ne 'KeyRelease';
my $code = $event{'detail'};
my $mod = $event{'state'};
... the rest of my code here
}
Once you have a select handle, you can can_read for input with a time out as part of the Gtk loop or any AnyEvent loop - but I'll leave that for you to setup :)
my @a=qw(random brilliant braindead); print $a[rand(@a)];