Bill Sconce asks about things like application color choices.
Bill,
Traditionally, these things were "X resources". There's a
whole boodle of stuff somewhere in the X documntation about class name
versus item name, etc., and how to wildcard things so that you can
have all xterms do this, except that a certain xterm will do that, or
something of that ilk. I can remember finding this stuff in the man
pages for the base X system, but you had to dig for it, and it was
hard to tell what they were saying unless you already knew what you
were looking for.
The "resources" are maintained in the X server, which is nice,
since apps that you run remotely with, say, xon will ask your server
for the settings that you prefer on that workstation. xrdb is the
program that loads your .Xdefaults into the server. It has to get run
when you start the server or log in to xdm, so it gets invoked in one
of your personal .x startup files, like .xclient, or .xinitrc, or if
you don't have a personal one, various vintages of the system-wide
startup files might try to look for ~/.Xdefaults for you. I gave up
trying to follow the improvements before "desktops" replaced window
managers, so the exact path of the data is a matter for exploration.
Things like "backgroundcolor" are common enough, but not every
program documents their resource names well (at least in the online
documents that I've found). It can be a chore to find the resource
name that will do what you want. In the past I've found stuff in the
application's man or info pages.
Of course, the developer of any particular application is free
to ignore the resource system. And some apps may have ways of
overriding the resource selections. For example, emacs will follow
the resource selections, but you can also "customize" that stuff via
the .emacs file, the emacs internal customize system, and the command
line. Which one wins when something gets specified in multiple palces
is up to the developer, but it usually isn't the X resources.
And if you're running Ximian, or one of the other "modern"
environments, who knows what they may have done to avoid giving the
user the dredful pain of having a customizable system.
Bill
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