X11 How To Stop xterm Auto Launch

Question

I am able to stop X11 from automatically launching the default xterm window when I manually start X11. I did that by changing the Leopard X11 plist:
defaults write org.x.X11_launcher apptorun /usr/X11/bin/xhost
But when I launch an X11 application, X11 is now automatically started in Leopard. And even with the above plist change, X11 still automatically launches the default xterm and does not launch the X11 application that I double-clicked. Once X11 is running, double-clicking the X11 application does launch the application and does not automatically launch the default xterm.
Any idea how to get X11 to not launch the default xterm and to start the X11 application when X11 is not already running?
Thanks.

Answer 1

Richard,
I don't have an elegant answer to this annoying problem, but wish to take this opportunity to express my thoughts to the programmer, Ben Byer, I think is his name. With X11, I am both a power user and a programmer and I think this gives me some useful perspective.
There was a huge discussion of this, which is archived at
http://lists.apple.com/archives/x11-users/2007/Nov/thrd5.html#00418
In one particular post, at
http://lists.apple.com/archives/x11-users/2007/Nov/msg00442.html
Ben writes,
I am a little confused, though, as to why we are trying to find a way to
preemptively launch the X server without starting a "real program". Is
this to avoid the .xinitrc / .Xresources race condition?
Many responses came in from that question, but I saw no mention of the following basic principles:
1. The programmer can NEVER anticipate what the user will want to do with the software, unless the programmer is also the user, and even then he usually doesn't get it right.
2. NEVER force the user to have or not have anything (such as that pesky initial xterm) happen. There will always be someone who wants things differently.
3. X11 was designed to be a NETWORK TRANSPARENT windowing system from the very beginning (Project Athena at MIT, circa early 1980s, I think). Ben makes the common mistake of assuming that there is a user logged into the machine launching applications.
My point is that there are many ways to launch an X11 client application which do not require that annoying xterm window, including other applications (that may not even be X aware, see below) and other machines on the network. Even background jobs, such as large-scale scientific simulations, running locally, remotely, or maybe distributed, might need to open windows on my display.
The way I typically interact when doing my scientific work is to launch a Carbon version of Emacs.app (Cocoa version also available, I think), which is NOT an X application. I like this Emacs better than the X-aware versions, for reasons I won't go into here. I will typically be running a command-line application, such as an interface to a production code, or an interpreted language such as Python, Yorick, or some more obscure languages and do something that pops up an X11 graphics window.
That is just one example of a workflow that needs X11 running but doesn't need an xterm, nor any other initial X application running. In principle, ANY non-X application could be written to launch an X window for whatever reason. No initial xterm is needed. (In cases like mine, I just need to arrange DISPLAY to be set ahead of time. I do that in my bashrc file.)
On a related issue, I was absolutely blown away (in a bad way) when OS X first came out, to see that Apple took the wonderful Unix platform and developed a strictly non-X GUI on top of it with no support for X11-style network transparency. X11 was "patched on" in what to me seems a very sloppy way as the platform evolved. My initial expectation was that ALL Mac apps would be network transparent, with Cocoa, Carbon, etc. layered over X11 (and the security issues related to X11 fixed too, of course). This way, if I have an interesting result I want to show to a co-worker, I can just pop it up in an X window on his screen.
Or, similarly, at home I might get something interesting in my email or find something on the web, or whatever, and wish to pop it up on my wife's screen so she can see, rather than do something unnecessarily complicated such as forwarding a new email message to her or make her come to my desk. And why stop there? I might call someone up on the phone across town, or across the planet, and want to pop something up on his screen.
Ok, I'll go back to work now and figure out how to get rid of that annoying xterm now.
Ben, if you are reading this, please fix Apple's X11 so that it behaves.