[mythtv-users] OT: Weirdness with Xterm control menus

Mike Thomas mt3 at pfw.demon.co.uk
Fri Dec 18 00:09:33 UTC 2015


On Thu, 17 Dec 2015 17:12:39 -0600
Craig Huff <huffcslists at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't know if it's something I did or something caused by an
> update, but sometime in the last couple of days all the control menus
> lost their "guts" -- all I get now is the heading, and even those are
> chopped off on the right end.  Holding down the control key and
> pressing the left, middle, and right mouse key in turn should get
> menus titled "Main Options", "VT Options", and "VT Fonts",
> respectively.  Now they only show "Main" (with the left edge of the
> "O" at the right edge of the pop-up box), an empty pop-up box, and
> "VT", respectively.  All the captions are off-center to the
> right-hand side of the pop-up box.  It seems that the pop-up boxes
> are incorrectly sized, but I don't know how they got changed and
> therefore how to restore them.
> 
> Has anyone encountered this before and know how to fix it?

Dear Craig,

I haven't experienced that particular problem but I can direct you to a
likely cause. It sounds like your X resources are messed up.

When an Athena programme loads it first uses its compiled-in defaults.
Then it tries to overwrite these settings by loading in the defaults in
the file named (/usr/X11 or somewhere similar)/.../app-defaults/XTerm.
Finally it examines the defaults set in the server's resource database.
You can see the resources your Xterm is picking up with appres XTerm.

X resources are hierarchical and they are loaded into the server at
session start-up by repeated executions of xrdb -merge file. My UNIX is
traditional so I am afraid I can't tell you quite how your particular
brand of UNIX loads them, but try looking for files in your home
directory named .xinitrc, .[Xx]session* and .Xresources*. Also I
suggest you try to locate a file called Xresources in your X directory
structure (typically /usr/X11).

If things are this messed up it is likely you have loaded some
resources twice or perhaps one of the aforementioned files has become
corrupted. Bear in mind that X resources are hierarchical so a simple
mistake can affect all your Athena applications. You can tell the range
of the problem by starting another Athena programme, and particularly
one with pop-up menus like xedit. Simply move the suspect files aside
and restart your X server to isolate the problem.

Mike.


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