For many years (decades) I’ve used one form or another of an X11 server on Macs to run various Linux/Unix graphical utilities with the latest server being XQuartz. The problem is that in the time since I switched to using Nix for my package management, I have twice encountered issues where the XQuartz build is broken. Combine this with the fact that XQuartz is really no longer maintained, this raises the question on whether I should be using it any longer.
One Remaining Use
For the past few years, my only remaining use of an X11 server has been feh because it is a very simple and fast image viewer / slideshow display. Using this inside XQuartz does bring in a few quirks such as inability to properly handle multiple displays with different resolutions and complete ignorance of the notch in MBP’s internal displays. I’ve often just worked around these but combined with questioning the continued use of XQuartz, I wondered if there is a better solution.
MVI
Turns out, MPV can be made into a very powerful image viewer and slideshow with some configuration. Here comes in the MPV Image Viewer (MVI) Repository. I took the mpv.conf and input.conf files and put them in the .config/mvi and the alias (alias mvi='mpv --config-dir=$HOME/.config/mvi'). I then customized them to my typical default desires and that was all I needed. The scripts which are available in this repo are also available via nix so I used it for installing the ones which interested me.
Removing XQuartz
And that did it, I now no longer need XQuartz on my machine and I removed it from my nix configuration. I also was able to remove my override on FFmpeg (see my article on nix) as a VDPAU codec will not try to launch XQuartz when it no longer exists.
The Irony
A few days after removing XQuartz and the need for my FFmpeg override to disable VDPAU in it, my PR to upstream this change to nixpkgs suddenly got an approval. Ironic that I’ve locally been working around this for over 6 months and now that I no longer need the override, it is finally making it upstream. Oh well, at least it’ll potentially benefit others in the community.