The following list indicates the weight of set resources.
  Items at the top have the greatest weight.

  1) Hard coded values for resources.
  2) Command line arguments.
  3) Resources pointed to by $XENVIRONMENT.
  4) Resource values loaded into the Resource Data Base via xrdb.
  5) Resources pointed to by other environment variables :

     IF $XUSERFILESEARCHPATH is set

       then it contains a list of directories to search.

     ELSE IF $XAPPLRESDIR is set

       it contains a single directory, and a short list of related
       directories (e.g. adjusted for language) is where resource files
       must be found.

     ELSE

       Look in a short list of places related to $HOME (e.g. language
       adjusted). This includes files in $HOME that have the name of
       the class of the application.

  6) Resource values set in $HOME/.Xdefaults, provided that the
     RESOURCE_MANAGER property hasn't been set via the xrdb command.
     (see the third paragraph in the xrdb man page)
  7) Values set in /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/*.
  8) Values set through through the application's fall back mechanism.

Some parts © 2009 Advameg, Inc.