[Techtalk] emacs

[Jeff Dike]

rbrooke at maine.rr.com said:
> The FILESEARCHPATH is something I found in a FAQ describing where
> emacs  looks for .Xresources, I thought perhaps it wasn't finding the
> file  because it wasn't in the PATH emacs was searching. 

emacs actually doesn't search any path.  xrdb (which I had forgotten
about) does all the magic.  Whatever starts your X login session (~/.xsession
for me) runs xrdb on a set of X resource files, which causes them all to
be merged into the RESOURCE_MANAGER property on the root window.  You can
see it with 'xrdb -query' or 'xprop -root'.  The X toolkit looks at that 
(rather than reading files) in order to figure out what it should look like.

This is necessary because of the network transparentness of X.  Something
running on a different machine can't count on getting the same Xdefaults
as something running locally because the X resource files may be different
on different machines.  So, the session manager stores them in the server
where all clients can get them.

				Jeff