Re: What is the proper way to set the default font these days?

[Deniz Dogan]

2009/6/8 Stephen J. Turnbull <address@hidden>:
> Miles Bader writes:
>
>  > David De La Harpe Golden <address@hidden> writes:
>  > > ?  It was my understanding (which could be flawed) that applications
>  > > never look at .Xdefaults, it's up to you to do an
>  > >
>  > > xrdb -merge .Xdefaults
>  >
>  > No, ~/.Xdefaults is read directly by applications,
>
> A behavior deprecated as of X11R5 in favor of using xrdb, which is
> handled on the server side.
>
> I guess there's nothing wrong with depending on Emacs reading
> .Xdefaults if you want to (except for the fact that GNOME will not
> respect your wishes), but that behavior has been obsolete for a long
> time.
>
>  > The "rules" (by my observation) are a bit bizarre:  If there's
>  > _anything_ in the server's database, even entries for an unrelated
>  > application, then ~/.Xdefaults is completely ignored, and only entries
>  > from the server database are used; otherwise ~/.Xdefaults is used.
>
> That's is indeed the defined behavior.  Specifically, Xlib reads
> ~/.Xdefaults if and only if *no resources at set at all* in the
> RESOURCE_MANAGER property on the server's root window.
>
>  > You'd think it would be more useful to automagically _merge_ the server
>  > database with the contents of ~/.Xdefaults, but that's not what the X
>  > libraries do.
>
> The intent was to encourage users to migrate to the modern style,
> which uniformly applies to remote clients as well as local ones (which
> obviously the .Xdefaults file can't, since it's read by the client).
>
> Why not just put
>
> (lambda () (shell-command "xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources"))
>
> on your save hook in xrdb buffers?
>
>
>
>

So if we go back to the original question... What is the proper way to
set the font? :)

-- 
Deniz Dogan