X11

I've been doing a lot of unix command line fu lately, getting familiar with the unixness of the Mac. It's really quite good. I had installed Apple's X11 server a while back and was using it to remotely work with the Linux cluster at work, which was quite impressive. It did seem to have one flaw I saw with window sizing with a particular application.

I later installed Matlab, which uses X11 to display its plot figure windows, and I as impressed with the speed of even fairly heavy 3D animated figures. I also have one or two other X11 programs, but I don't use X11 for my command line terminal windows - I use Apple's Terminal for that. So, I found the Xterm window that always popped up when X11 would start when I opened an X application was just unneeded clutter. The other day I found the file /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc and near the bottom of the script are the lines:

# start some nice programs



xterm &

I just commented the xterm line out:

# start some nice programs



#xterm &

You can always get an Xterm whenever you like from the X11 menu "Applications -> Terminal" or command-N.

Then, I came across a tip to enable smooth fonts in Apple's X11 (at least for apps that are able to use them). You need to create the file: /etc/X11/XftConfig with the following two lines:

dir "/Library/fonts"

dir "/System/Library/fonts"

You can then customize the X11 Applications menu to change the command for the xterm. Choose "Applications -> Cutsomize..." and double-click on the "command" field of the Terminal entry. Change this to be "xterm -fa Monaco -fs 12", and when you do use xterm, it will have a nice smooth font.

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