Xterm and .Xresources

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers,,,781-647-1813)]

Christoph <linuxguy at ici.NET> writes:

	Here's what I like to do... in your login profile add the following (adjusting
	for your home directory of course)

	`export XAPPLRESDIR=/home/chris/.app-defaults`

	now create the directory /home/chris/.app-defaults and edit a file called 
	XTerm.

One question:  While the file is called "XTerm", the  app  is  called
"xterm".   How do you know to change the capitalization like that?  I
checked with the "man xterm" page, and there is no occurrence of  the
strings  "XAPPLRESDIR" or "XTerm" anywhere, so there's no obvious way
a user could ever learn this sort of thing.

	And you should be all set.  No need to reload your Xresources.   This is a much
	cleaner way of accomplishing you goal.  To add more resource for various 
	applications, just create additional resource file in ~/.app-defaults
	Here is another example for ~/.app-defaults/XEarth

I notice that in this case the file and the program seem to have  the
same name. What's the rule here? Is it documented anywhere? How can a
user get a handle on this?


And on a related topic, is there some what to discover what an  app's
resources are called? On this machine, and on many other linuxes that
I've used in the past few years, whenever I run  gv  it  gives  me  a
popup complaining about about a number of missing colors:

	Warning: Cannot allocate colormap entry for "AntiqueWhite2"
	Warning: Cannot allocate colormap entry for "AntiqueWhite4"
	Warning: Cannot allocate colormap entry for "gray90"
	Warning: Cannot allocate colormap entry for "#D3B5B5"

It also has a number of widgets  that  are  white-on-white  and  thus
utterly  unreadable.   I'd  guess  that  the  solution is to set some
resource with "Color" in its name, but aside from that, I don't  have
a clue as to what these four resource names might be.  The docs don't
seem to mention it at all.  Is there  some  what  that  this  can  be
learned  from  an  app?   I can run strings on the binaries, and sure
enough, I can see the above strings there, but they don't seem to  be
next  to anything that looks like a resource name with "Color" on its
end.  I suppose I could  spend  months  single-stepping  through  the
program  with  a  debugger,  but so far it's been easier to just live
with it and grump about the opaqueness of it all.

There are quite a lot of other apps that  have  similar  undocumented
resources.  Is there some general way to learn what I should put into
an .app-defaults file?  Is it documented anywhere?

One possibility is that there might be some way to ask the  X  server
"What  resources  have  you been asked for in the past N seconds?" Or
maybe there's a way to tell the server "Write a  trace  of  all  your
resource  requests  to /tmp/resources." I'd guess that these might be
possible, simply because someone had to have spent time debugging the
X  server  and/or  wm, and such hooks seem likely as a debugging aid.
But if such a thing is even possible, there don't seem to be clues in
the documentation on how to do it.

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