From: Marc Chamberlin via openSUSE Users <users@lists.opensuse.org> Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2023 16:38:14 -0800 On 11/11/23 16:25, Bob Rogers via openSUSE Users wrote:
From: Marc Chamberlin via openSUSE Users <users@lists.opensuse.org> Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2023 15:26:09 -0800
Hello SuSE universe - I am running OpenSuSE 15.4 x64 with the KDE/Plasma desktop . . .
Looking at the output of "ldd /usr/bln/emacs-x11" and "rpm -q --requires emacs-x11", it looks like the emacs binary (for 15.5, though it should be no different) was built using the Athena toolkit, which seems to use Xresources [1]. E.g., from my ~/.Xdefaults file:
Emacs.geometry: 81x51 Emacs.menuBar: off Emacs.toolBar: off
-- Bob Rogers http://www.rgrjr.com/
[1] Athena is pretty old, and is considered semi-obsolescent within the Emacs project.
Thanks Bob for your thoughts, I am gonna assume you were speaking to other gurus about Emacs, cuz most of what you said was above my own pay grade . . . Sorry; I am a long-time and heavy user of emacs, but I build my own, so I'm not very familiar with the version that's shipped with openSUSE. On top of that, I don't use the menus, so I had to poke around a bit in order to figure this out. So I wanted to state what I had learned and how I had learned it precisely, in case I made a misteak. . . .so I didn't follow you. What is Athena? Marc... In a nutshell, Project Athena [1] is where X11 came from. X Athena Widgets aka Xaw [2] is an X11 toolkit developed by Project Athena to provide menus and such; the openSUSE emacs was compiled to use it instead of Qt (it's a compile-time option). openSUSE provides Xaw via the libXaw3d package, which is a somewhat updated version published by X.org [3], the current X11 maintainer. But as far as I can tell, since the original libXaw was created pretty much at the dawn of time as far as X11 is concerned, it only uses the original text-based customization scheme, where you write key/value pairs in your ~/.Xdefaults file in order to control it, as illustrated above. This is read into the X server at startup, or refreshed by doing xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults if you want to update in the middle of a session. Unfortunately, in order to use this you have to know what names and values to write there, and I've been unable to find any user documentation anywhere. So I think your best bet would be to submit a bug report. If there's some valid reason the powers-that-be have to persist in building emacs with libXaw3d (and I have to wonder what that could be), they ought to be able to tell you how to customize it. -- Bob [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Athena_Widgets [3] https://www.x.org/wiki/guide/client-ecosystem/#index3h3