Yes, I really like this article, I used it to get going with fbdev before I moved on to XCB, but only skimmed the remainder since it was avoiding libraries completely it was getting a little verbose (although on second thought DRM doesn't look too bad, and also I missed libdrm should probably see how much that can do).

Just realized now revisiting this that the author also showed how to directly implement xclient! the example is rather large confirming my suspicions RE parent comments.