XSETTINGS
More info
- Creator
- Owen Taylor
- Released
- 2001
- Type
- Protocol
- Spec
- freedesktop.org: XSETTINGS 0.5
The freedesktop protocol that lets X programs change theme, fonts and DPI while running, through one property everyone reads on the same window.
Xresources were set at login and read when a program started; change your font and you restarted. Owen Taylor at Red Hat, who wrote much of GTK 2, specified an alternative in 2001. A settings manager takes ownership of the X selection _XSETTINGS_S0 and puts every shared setting in the property _XSETTINGS_SETTINGS on its own window. Clients read the property at startup and subscribe to PropertyNotify, so a new theme colour or DPI value takes effect in every open window at once.
The keys are short and hierarchical, Net/ThemeName, Gtk/FontName, Xft/DPI, and the values are integers, strings or colours. The manager is gnome-settings-daemon in GNOME, xfsettingsd in Xfce, and under minimal window managers Daniel Erat's xsettingsd will do, reading a text file and nothing more. Qt listens through its GTK platform theme, so the protocol became the thin bridge between the two big toolkits. Under Wayland there is no selection to own; the equivalent goes over D-Bus and the settings portal.