To Be gnu/Hurd
Mon, 14 Jul 2008
Using Apple's X11 with a .Xresources file
Because I am a horrible masochist I have been trying to use my second favorite window manager, xmonad, to handle the terminal windows on my new Mac. This was surprisingly easy after compiling GHC with MacPorts. I also had to compile xmonad, xmonad-contrib, and ghc-x11 by hand, but that was relatively painless.
The real pain came when I dug into Apple's deceptively simple X11.app. I foolishly assumed that clicking X11.app would start X, instead I found that it launched a vanilla xterm. After some digging I found out that Apple's X11 uses launchd to listen on a special socket for any requests from a X client. Apparently X11.app simply launches xterm, which in turn makes an X request, which in turn triggers launchd to start X. Simple enough, but because of the fact that X11 is started after xterm, none of the settings from .Xresources are in place when xterm launches. So not only am I required to launch xterm if I want to launch X, I am also forced to use xterm with the default settings.
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