Kill, must kill!

[Jonathan Hepburn]

On 10/30/07, Brian J. Tarricone <bjt23 at cornell.edu> wrote:

> 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).

Ah, thanks for the explanation. I actually quite like the
xfce-settings-manager, it's just its presence as a daemon that took me
unawares. I'm used to knowing which files to back up from WindowMaker
or GNUStep, and how to edit them by hand if absolutely necessary, so I
automatically assumed that XFCE used a similar system.

> 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.

Perhaps I should have said "So devilishly hard to _find out_ how to
change GTK behaviour using a text editor". Gnome has had its arguments
over hiding advanced options, so lets not go there. All I want is to
be able to prevent Firefox jumping up on a different (focused)
workspace, which I believe to be possible but haven't ever tracked
down (granted, I haven't put a massive amount of time in).

Incidentally, which config file is used to store options in XFCE4.4?
I'm trying to make all instances of mplayer universal, but the options
I've found haven't worked (I'm at work now, so I can't check).

> > (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 ^_~.

That's what I figured. It would get even worse the instant someone
made a reference to which text editor was being used on the config
files... (there is no complicated and ferocious argument in computer
science which cannot be reduced to a simpler and more ferocious
argument - apologies to just about everyone).

Slainte,
J