One Thing Well had a really useful post not too long ago showing how to run an X application without firing up a full window manager.
In my work, I use a number of servers (running as VMs). These have firefox installed, because it’s a dependency for the launchpad windmill tests. But, because they’re servers, they don’t have any windowing environment, and I’d really rather not install one. This x only trick is so useful for me, that I scripted up a little version of it that I can pass an application and tty # to it without having to think about the xinit arguments.
The gist for it is below:
It is, obviously, trivially simple. But it is so handy. Thanks to One Thing Well for sharing this.