header photo

Exoplanets

Yale Astronomy

Mac OS X Tips

Enabling Mouse Clicks in X11 in Mac OS X Leopard

>> Mac OX X Tips

I wanted to get remote X11 and IDL working and so did some poking around. I'm not positive which of these steps actually solved the problem but they are both easy and the new version of X11 supposedly solves some other issues anyway.

  1. Download and install the newest Quartz X11
    http://static.macosforge.org/xquartz/downloads/X11-2.3.2.1.dmg
  2. Update the X11 preferences to ensure that the Quartz Window Manager acknowledges clicks

    defaults write org.x.x11 wm_click_through -bool true

You can also verify that this was written properly by just opening the ~/Library/preferences/org.x.x11 file, looking for the wm_click_through tag and ensuring that the value is .  Some instructions online tell you that the tag is wmclickthrough, which doesn't work.  Others tell you that the application is com.apple.x11, but you just installed an alternate x11 so this doesn't work either.

Supposedly problems cropped up after Mac OS X 10.5.3, so if you haven't updated lately you may not be having a problem anyway.  The problem I was having was mouse clicks (where mouse location was being tracked) were being ignored in the thid tool.

Return to Mac OX X Tips