Installing snapd on fedora seems to have had a weird effect on the X installation and I need advice on how to debug it. System is Fedora 36 and I have FVWM on X. Until today on login `/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc-common would find my ~/.Xresources file and load (technically -merge) it. After the install this file is ignored. The system-wide /etc/X11/Xresources` *is* getting loaded on login, but the local one isn't. For example, putting my personal settings in the global file has the desired effect. Manually calling `$ xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources from a terminal does nothing, while $ xrdb -load ~/.Xresources clears the database but doesn't load anything ($ xrdb -q now has no output). $ xrdb -load /etc/X11/Xresources` has the same effect (even though at login the file is loaded). Running the commands as root has no effect either. I am at a loss: how does one debug the interaction between xrdb and the X server?

I have a condition in .xinitrc that is not met, and I don't understand why: I have the .Xresources file in my ~ (with read permissions), and my ~/.xinitrc contains a line with [[ -f ~/.Xresources ]] && xrdb -load ~/.Xresources & However the condition between double brackets is not met. Why is that? The file exists and is located in my home! If I change the line to this, xrdb -load ~/.Xresources & Then it works, and also works if I run [[ -f ~/.Xresources ]] && xrdb -load ~/.Xresources from bash. Why is not working in .xinitrc? My solution for the moment was to put directly the second line, however I don't understand why the condition is not met.

Every time I have to connect to an external monitor, it remains "disconnected" according to

and the second screen remains black. To solve this problem, I always have to close all my GUI apps and the X server, login again and restart everything. Tests I did : if I go to

before doing this, the screen is duplicated as expected but when I go back to

(which I use to

) it disappears. My config is Arch Linux + bspwm, my

.xinitrc

is simply

bspwm

I'd really like to keep my programs open whenever I need to do a presentation.

I've got a setup where I'm always logging in to the same account (Centrify managed on the same network), but some of the systems have 24" 1080p (1920x1080) monitor(s) and others have 27" 4K (3840x2160) monitors. The default Gnome scaling factor is roughly correct for the 1080p monitors, but leaves things unreadably tiny on the 4K monitors. I can manually fix it each time I switch machines by launching the Tweaks tool, going to the Font tab, and setting the Scaling Factor to 1.38 (for 4K) or 0.98 (for 1080p) to make it readable, and Gnome updates to use the new scaling factor immediately. I'm trying to script this to occur automatically in my .bashrc (we have a weird setup where .bashrc is always run, even for the login shell; I just test for being in a non-ssh, non-interactive login shell so it doesn't run except in the login shell) so I don't need to do anything manual when I switch machines, so I wrote two .Xresources files, one with:

-none
Xft.dpi:         132

and the other with:

-none
Xft.dpi:         94

and based on which machine I'm logging into, I run:

-sh
xrdb -merge ~/path/to/appropriate/.Xresources

to apply the correct dpi setting for that machine. But while some other settings in the .Xresources file (omitted) take effect immediately (the applications are closed on login, so they load the correct settings when I launch them) it doesn't change the setting for my existing login's Gnome shell UII; it only applies when I log out and back in again, and I'd rather not have to log in, out and back in again each time I switch machines (that's worse than the manual update in Tweaks). So my question is: #### Is there any programmatic way to do one of: #### 1. Tell Gnome to reload config from the xrdb settings (xrdb -query -all clearly shows the change was made, it just isn't being applied)? #### 2. Directly tell Gnome to use a new scaling factor in the same way the Tweaks tool does it? #### 3. (If I have an XY problem) A cleaner way to apply a custom DPI in some other way?

When docking/undocking my laptop, I change Xft.dpi in the X server resource database using xrdb. After that happened, I would like to inform as many applications as possible that they should re-read and apply the changed settings. According to [this answer](https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/261389/347377) : > Reloading the configuration is a feature that not all programs support. X resources in particular are usually read when a program starts up; there's no protocol to notify an application that it should use new resources¹. Rxvt tends towards being small, so it's no surprise that it doesn't support reloading its configuration after startup. Firefox is a bit bigger than Rxvt therefore my question: *Q*: How do I inform Firefox about a change in the X server resource database? Related: * https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/261044/347377

I have tried any and all combinations of the URxvt.font but it just isn't working. This is how my .Xresources file looks like: ! URxvt URxvt.foreground: white URxvt.font: xft:monospace:size=10.5 URxvt.letterSpace: -1 URxvt.depth: 32 URxvt.background: #000000 URxvt.scrollBar: false ! Xft Xft.autohint: 0 Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault Xft.hintstyle: hintslight Xft.hinting: 1 Xft.antialias: 1 Xft.rgba: rgb Xft.dpi: 120 However it doesn't care if I set size to 10.5 or 100.5, the size won't change. Even xrdb -query shows it's set to size=100.5 but all the text would be very small. It only happens with the monospace font (which is mapped to Inconsolata). Any other font gets resized just fine. pixelsize works, too, but I need to use size because it lets the font scale according to Xft.dpi.

As in how can I get the *.foreground color value obtained with xrdb -query assigned to a variable in the script. I'm trying to get both background and foreground colors into two variables that will be passed to another program as parameters.

I would like to query a single value from ~/.Xresources. xrdb -query gives me the whole configuration, but I would specifically like to echo the *value* of an *individual* property (e.g., URxvt.internalBorder or *color14). How can I do this?

xrdb prints anything that you have configured, but **how do you print the values for the settings which you have not touched?** Either generally for X resources or specifically for urxvt. The colour scheme, that is, color0 onwards, can be found in an obscure manual . Trawling around to find all the defaults is going to be tedious and error prone, since documentation could always be out of date.