Use other terminal apps with Apple's X11

Aug 26, '04 10:14:00AM

Contributed by: ruebenschuss

There are many other hints about terminal-problems with all kinds of X11 and window managers, especially concerning cut and paste. I hate xterm, don't mind Terminal.app, but like iTerm.app the most. So I want Apple's X11 to launch iTerm instead of xterm, to have a nicer user interface and a functional cut and paste. My solution was to move the xterm binary from /usr/X11R6/bin/xterm to /usr/X11R6/bin/xterm_old, and place iTerm there instead. I had some difficulties with direct aliases or links, so I did the following. Place a file called xterm into /usr/X11R6/bin/ (after moving the original) and edit it. The only line is:

open /path/to/iTerm/iTerm.app
Now make it executable (chmod 755 xterm), and live happy ever after.

From now on, X11 will start up and open iTerm instead of xterm. SSH X-forwarding and everything else seems to work all right for me, so there's no drawback to my knowledge. You now have a nice terminal app with full cut and paste support. If you don't like iTerm, you can modify the one-line script to launch any other terminal program.

I know that people will probably not like to replace the xterm binary, but I just wanted to mention this here for those who don't have a problem with that. I would also be happy to see someone post the X11 preference entry which tells X11 which terminal application to use.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2004082505230779