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by sergeykish 1925 days ago
- I've never seen xrdb used outside of terminal configuration

- You have to link against X11, dwl (dwm for Wayland) implemented in 2500 LOC [1]

Plan 9 /dev/draw is simpler yet, somehow it was not reason against X11.

[1] https://github.com/djpohly/dwl

2 comments

All the old X apps used xrdb, to some degree. I think of xclock, xbiff, xditview, xcalc, bitmap, etc.
Everyone stopped using xrdb more than twenty years ago, same things for drawing primitives.

I understand the wish some seems to have for things to never change. It's probably very comforting but things have to move with their time or they will be left behind.

I'm not saying applications should continue to use or go back to xrdb. I'm pointing out the fact that having unified configuration system is very useful and I'm disappointed Wayland didn't pick up this idea.
Wayland reflects status quo. Truly desired missing features are reimplemented — screenshots, screensharing, networking. Try to make a change, maybe you'd find out this feature is not that useful.

I'd better think why .Xresources never catched up. For example, I've downloaded Gnome theme. It contains some CSS files, a lot of images and some rc files. Or check about:config, chrome://flags/ — no images there, but interface is so much nicer than a list in man pages and plain text editing.

> - I've never seen xrdb used outside of terminal configuration

Terminal and Emacs are the two I'm using it for.