Re: Sanest way to make emacs behave on a Solaris OS

[Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com>]

Emanuel Berg wrote:
> Bob Proulx writes:
> >   xrdb -m ~/.Xresources
> >
> > The -m merges.  The -l loads.  I selected merging because you
> > may have sevaral files all merged together so this would only
> > change what you changed.  Using -l would empty first and then
> > only load that file so if you had several files, perhaps a
> > /etc/X11/something, then that other would be lost.  But I will
> > use -l when I want only what is in that file, nothing more and
> > nothing less, and want to avoid anything else that might have
> > been set elsewhere.  Somewhat like the emacs -Q of things.
> 
> Interesting. I have
> 
> xrdb ~/.Xresources
> 
> as the first line of .xinitrc - which is read after 'xinit', in
> .zprofile (of zsh).
> 
> Without an operation (like -merge or -load, or -m/-l) the default
> operation is -all, according to the man page. But what that means,
> is not the easiest thing to understand, even with the man page:

The -all as I understand it applies to where to apply the properties.
Both to RESOURCE_MANAGER and to SCREEN_RESOURCES.  A different aspect
of things different from what I was talking about.

The -load option is also the default.

       -load   This  option  indicates  that the input should be loaded as the
               new value of the specified properties, replacing  whatever  was
               there  (i.e.   the  old  contents  are  removed).   This is the
               default action.

So these following commands would all be equivalent.

  $ xrdb .Xresources
  $ xrdb -l .Xresources
  $ xrdb -load .Xresources

> I used it the same way when I did my experimentation on Solaris:
> that is, without any operation.

I think that means you were doing the same as 'xrdb -l .Xresources'.
Which is fine.  Probably you only have a single source for everything.

Here is a slightly contrived example of how you might have multiple
files and might want to use both load and merge operations.

  xrdb -load $HOME/.Xresources
  if [ -f $HOME/.Xresources.$(hostname) ]; then
    xrdb -merge $HOME/.Xresources.$(hostname)
  fi

As I recall the KDE 3 desktop environment keeps a set of X resources
in a private location in the .kde/something location.  Then if a
~/.Xresources exists it adds that on top of its own private copy.  Or
something like that.  It has been a while since I used KDE 3.  But
specifically because I remembered it having additional resources is
why I danced around the issue with -merge.

Bob