X application resources and the X Toolkit Library

Loading xresources and the libXt mechanism translation tables at the example of xterm(1) which is linking libXt.

External Docs

• The comp.windows.x-FAQ contains much stuff at # 39)

• The comp.windows.x.intrinsics FAQ (libXt). Some more details.

• (comp.windows.x) 'Getting more performance out of X'-FAQ
  contains some more interesting details about the way, libXt is loading ressources.

• The xfree-xterm by Thomas E. Dickey - and his Xterm FAQ

What could it look like? -

• My XTerm Resource File (~17kB)
  with comments, suggestions, motivations, explanations,
  including other helpful commands affiliated with this.

The X11 source contains documentation for libXt.
Here an extract (gzipped postscript, ~32kB), (plain text, ~52 kB), containing the following:

• "Loading the Resource Database", "Parsing the Command Line" (S. 32-36)
• "Resource File Format", "Translation Table Syntax" (S. 243-250)
• table of contents

You find the original (intrinsics.PS) in

• $SRC/xc/doc/hardcopy/Xt/intrinsics.PS in the MIT X11 source
• or in a directory named like /pub/X11/R6.5.1/xc/doc/hardcopy/Xt/ on your local X11 ftp mirror.
• Or in the XFree86 Source or on your XFree86 FTP mirror, /pub/XFree86/4.1.0/doc/ (pay attention to the version, it's not contained it the 4.0.3 FTP tree.

XTerm control sequences (ctlseqs.ms)

This has nothing to do with libXt or Xresources but for xterm it matches well here anyway.
All the control sequences are documented in the file ctlseqs.ms, which is troff source (or nroff source resp.).

There are several ways to read it:

• tbl -ms ctlseqs.ms | nroff -ms | col -b > ctlseqs.txt (using nroff)
• groff -ms -t -Tlatin1 ctlseqs.ms | col -b > ctlseqs.txt (plain text, ~43kB)
• groff -ms -t -Tdvi ctlseqs.ms > ctlseqs.dvi (TeX dvi, gzipped, ~30 kB)
• groff -ms -t -Tps ctlseqs.ms > ctlseqs.ps (Postscript, gzipped, ~140kB)

Newsgroups: comp.terminals,comp.os.linux.admin
Message-ID: <slrn8c0cuj.f5a.m.ramsch@galadriel.forwiss.uni-passau.de>
Date: 3 Mar 2000 22:51:21 +0100
From: Martin Ramsch
Subject: Re: Escape sequences for xterm?