As of November 2014, the latest versions of startxwin use xinit to start the Cygwin/X server, which is actually called XWin.exe. The process goes something like this:
- You call
startxwin startxwin creates a new .Xauthority file and one called .serverauth.1234 (where 1234 changes each time you start X)startxwin sets up some client and server parametersstartxwin calls xinit with the client and server parameters, including some optional shell scripts and a reference to the auth file.xinit starts the X server, running some of the rc scriptsxinit starts the client (usually xterm) or client rc script. We want to avoid this- When you close the client or the client rc script finishes,
xinit shuts down the X server. If we avoid step 6, we also need to avoid this
It is possible to run XWin.exe directly from within a Bash login shell, without the surrounding tasks that startxwin and xinit perform. The main advantage of this is that it behaves like we want: the X server starts and remains running. Unfortunately, since there is no .Xauthority file passed during startup, your X server would permit any local process to connect to it, which is insecure.
Fortunately it's xinit that does most of the stuff we don't want. There's a quick hack that bypasses xinit but keeps the remaining elements of startxwin that are related to the server itself.
TL;DR: In startxwin, there's a line near the bottom that reads:
eval xinit \"$client\" $clientargs -- \"$server\" $display $serverargs
Change that line to:
eval \"$server\" $display $serverargs
From now on, the startxwin script will call XWin.exe directly, rather than calling xinit. Obviously this will disable any client rc scripts, but we didn't want those in the first place. It also means that X will continue running without needing a client process to keep it alive (i.e. keep xinit from killing it).