I was having a problem or two with the new X11.app in Leopard. It turns out that are some new versions of Xquartz that you can install that fix a lot of problems.

The instructions, including a handy-dandy shell script that makes it brainless, are here. If you want a whole lot more info on X11 in Leopard, check out some of my del.icio.us links from a few days ago.

Before:

marc@promc-2n-dhcp155:~/sw$ ./Xquartz -version
X11.app starting:
Xquartz server based on X.org Release 7.2, built on 2007924

After installing the 1.2a11 version:

marc@hyperion:~/sw$ /usr/X11/bin/Xquartz -version
X11.app starting:
Xquartz server based on X.org Release 7.2, built on 20071116

What I’ve noticed after the update:

• When I Cmd-Tab back to X11, my xterm now pops to the front, like it should. IIRC, this “xterm not surfacing” bug was a bug in X11.app in Tiger that was fixed in 10.4.3. Ah yes, here it is. Then it broke in Leopard and now thankfully, this update fixes it.
• I couldn’t paste into an xterm with Option-Click in the shipping version of X11.app. Now I can after this update.
• Oddly, running Xquartz -version doesn’t output the 1.2a11 version that is denoted on the web page. Nor does running ident on it show that version number. Those would be nice additions. Update: Apple’s Ben Byer kindly informed me that you can get the version number from…are you ready for this?…the About dialog. I guess I am officially a command-line guy.
  🙂

I’m happy. I have no other complaints about X11.app at the moment, though it seems from the links that I looked at (mentioned above), there are quite a few known issues with X11.app and so there are likely to be a few more updates over time.

I will also note that the recently released 10.5.1 update does not seem to have these fixes as it did not clobber my new version of Xquartz.

Still pretty happy with my new MacBook Pro, though I keep accidentally knocking the MagSafe power plug out, which is getting a tad annoying.