Kill, must kill!

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Jonathan Hepburn wrote:

> That's the bit I'm not used to: I'm more familiar with settings
> managers which write a config file which is then read by the relevant
> applications, rather than a program which exists for the purpose of
> telling another program how to behave.

Both models certainly have their merits.  Unfortunately our (aging) 
config system is even more limited than that -- only the settings 
manager daemon is allowed to set settings, and everyone else can only 
read.  I've been working on a new system for the past couple months that 
should be ready Any Day Now[tm] that's a lot more flexible (though still 
involves a 'settings daemon'), and will probably eventually (not for 
'v1.0' though) have a mode where applications can more or less directly 
read from the configuration store (mainly for performance reasons).

 > This would explain why it's so
> devilishly hard to find out how to change GTK behaviour with config
> files, then!

Actually, you can modify pretty much all of gtk's tunables by creatin a 
~/.gtkrc-2.0 file and adding 'stuff' to that.  You'll have to dig 
through gtk's resource file/themeing documentation to figure out how to 
do that, and I don't think there's a central place where you can figure 
out what all the various properties are: you have to dig through all of 
the gtk API docs.  But it can be done, and it's quite powerful.  The 
gtkrc file overrides what's in XSETTINGS (which is what the xfce 
settings manager sets), so you could maintain your settings in your 
gtkrc if you want, and nothing else could override it.

> (N.B.: I'm really, really, _really_, not trying to start a discussion
> about which is _better_.)

Good; we could be here for months... or years ^_~.

	-brian