Hrvoje> SL Baur <steve(a)xemacs.org&gt; writes: Think about what a "resourceless" XEmacs would be. About 1MB lighter, for one thing, since a lot of data would be missing. An X resource is not something you "have" or "don't have", it's a variable which can be initialized by the user. It must be initialized to something. It is not too wrong to use the following model: 1. xemacs is read into memory with the hard-coded values from the source code. 2. Where the values exist in /usr/X11/lib/X11/app-defaults/XEmacs, they overwrite the source code specified values. In the app-defaults file resources normally are specified with a lead *, so these always apply. 3. Look in the user resource database (.Xdefaults, or the root window properties used by xrdb) for resources specified by class name (ie, with a leading capital letter). Any such values overwrite the current values. 4. Look in the app-defaults file for resources specified by instance name, with a name matching the current instance. Overwrite the values of any matching resources. App-defaults files should have none of these. 5. Look in the user database, match, and overwrite as appropriate. (I may have the order of 3 and 4 inverted.) If you want the equivalent of --vanilla for X resources, there are two approaches I can see. One is the xrdb </dev/null approach. However, I don't think this will work if you (or your system administrator) has altered app-defaults/XEmacs. The second is to get a pristine app-defaults XEmacs, and prepend "vanilla*" to every single resource name. Merge that into your xrdb, and then xemacs -name vanilla will work the way you want it to. According to the man page, adding resources is the only function that the -name option has; not deleting them. Hrvoje> I don't know if it ever worked. The funny thing is that I Hrvoje> don't even know if it's *supposed* to work. It doesn't Hrvoje> work in FSFmacs, for instance. It works for xterm, Hrvoje> though. `xterm -name foo' effectively makes xterm ignore Hrvoje> all of my resources. Presumably all your resources are specified with "xterm*...", not "XTerm*..."? Hrvoje> If we do agree that this is a bug in need of fixing, maybe Hrvoje> someone can produce a patch. It looks easy to fix, but I Hrvoje> know next to nothing about X so I wouldn't want to break Hrvoje> anything. XEmacs resources work the way I expect them to, except for the "XEmacs" vs. "Emacs" class name stuff, where I have no intuition.