[Techtalk] emacs

[Raven Brooke]

Now this is interesting. It turned out that I did have a .Xclients file in 
my home directory, created by switchdesktop (when I was unable to launch 
KDE). I removed that, I added the xrdb command to /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc, 
then to /etc/X11/xinit/Xclients. None of these changed the situation: I 
still have to explicitly run xrdb each time I startx in order to have my 
.Xresources file read. There was already a line in xinitrc 

userresources=$HOME/.Xresources
 
which I would guess is _supposed_ to be telling X to read my .Xresourses.

Any ideas?


Thanks,

Raven

On Sat, 3 Nov 2001, Akkana wrote:

> Raven Brooke writes:
> > Thanks, this worked beautifully! It was very frustrating to have the 
> > values I wanted in my .Xresources ignored by emacs. I did actually log out 
> > and restart x, don't know why that didn't work, but the xrdb sure did  : )
> 
> It might be that your X startup isn't reading .Xresources.
> 
> Here's what happens: xinit looks for the system startup file, probably
> something under /usr/lib/X11/xinit.  On my redhat 7.1 system, that
> contains a file called xinitrc which does a buncha stuff including loading
> ~/.Xresources, then looks for a ~/.Xclients and runs it, or if you
> don't have one, it calls /etc/X11/xinit/Xclients instead.
> (Other distros may work a little differently.)  I think you can
> have either a .xinitrc in your home directory (which would override
> the system's xinitrc) or a .Xclients (which is run by the system
> .xinitrc instead of the built-in one, but then you still get the
> system's xinitrc).  But that seems to vary from release to release.
> 
> Also varying from version to version is whether the system file looks
> for .Xresources or .Xdefaults.  I currently have .Xdefaults whereas
> the system xinitrc only looks for .Xresources, and I'm not currently
> doing an xrdb -l $HOME/.Xdefaults in my .Xclients, yet my settings are
> working, which means that the path I described in the previous paragraph
> isn't complete and I'm missing something. :-)
> 
> But the upshot is: if neither .Xresources nor .Xdefaults seems to
> be loaded when you start X, check whether you have a .xinitrc or
> .Xclients that might be overriding the system file which would have
> been doing the xrdb for you.  Or just add the xrdb command to your
> own file.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Some clients actually do look for ~/.Xdefaults or ~/.Xresources and
> read and parse them directly (sometimes this is a compile-time option,
> which may or may not be switched on in the version you're using),
> but it's best not to rely on that and make sure it gets into the
> X resource database.
> 
> 	...Akkana
> 
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