Have you tried xquartz from http://xquartz.macosforge.org/ ? I am able to copy/paste between WingIDE and GIMP and native OS X apps using xquartz. There are issues such as switching between X11 and native apps, but it works better than the X11 distributed with OS X.

True, but would you rather not have it at all?

Definitely. Unusable software is as bad as none at all. Unless someone is paying well, I'm not going to deal with the issues.

Umm... Just don't use it. No one is forcing you to. Some of us are happy to have it, even if it does have some quirks.

Well, if you have a choice, sure. But if you're working in a team where everyone uses Eclipse, it's really nice to have the ability to run Eclipse.

Eclipse should be fine since it's using their own SWT for the GUI. They're not using Swing.

Iv'e developed Swing for 10 years and I think it's basically botched. Sun had no clue about UI development, and Sing is the expression of that. Compared with the UI frameworks on OS X it's like night and day. But I digress - I think SWT is a much better approach in any case.

I'd rather not have it. I tried running OpenOffice under X11, and the fact that I couldn't copy and paste text around the place did my head in, and I couldn't use it.

Yeah, OSX's X11 is utterly dreadful.

Be it as it may, but xterm/X11 still kills Terminal.app in text rendering speed. Also, MacVim is, on my Mac at least, visibly slower in text rendering than the naked vim under xterm.

I'm assuming this isn't so slow it shows up on a screen recording (of course, if it IS, that would be interesting), but either way could you please file a bug at http://bugreport.apple.com/? It will reach someone who cares.

Text rendering speed? I type a letter Terminal, it appears. What are you doing that text rendering speed matters?

Running any kind of build process would be an easy first example. :-)

Builds. sbcl in particular is insanely verbose and is often limited by slow terminals. The readme for bootstrapping it even specifically suggests using xterm over gnome-teriminal/konsole.

I get slowdowns caused by text rendering in terminal when rsyncing large numbers of files. It's easily worked around though, just minimize the terminal window

Try scrolling large amounts of text in MacVim, where the whole screen is refreshed, and then try the same in xterm+vim. MacVim is painfull to watch doing this, feel like working over a 300 baud modem. xterm/X11+vim are VERY fast combination for pure text editing, and that matters to me greatly. Same applies to Terminal.app (and it refuses to work in 256 colors, unlike xterm)