Resources

In X, clients have access to resources maintained within the server, such as fonts and colours etc. These server resources are accessed by clients using a resource id. Clients can request the server to create, use, share and destroy these resources.

In order to provide flexibility, clients have their own customizable data, also known as resources. These typically refer to colours, fonts, window sizes and positions, images, text, etc. and even parameters used by the application. A user can change the settings of these resources to change the appearance and behaviour of the application, without the necessity of recompilation. Usually, on starting up, an application retrieves its user-defined resource settings from a database maintained by the X resource manager, and from various text files. The application may, however, be programmed to override some of these user-defined resource settings. This concept of resources is, in fact, used by many non-X based applications. For instance, the file .cshrc, in a user's home directory, allows the user to customize the Unix C-Shell.