cairo [http://www.cairographics.org] has a Python binding (pycairo) [http://www.cairographics.org/pycairo/] since a long time, and some months ago a Python binding for XCB (xpyb) [http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xcb/xpyb/] has been released. Pycairo has no support for creating Xlib surfaces. You can get a