X Resources and IDL Preferences

Beginning with IDL 6.2, many values used to customize the appearance and behavior of IDL on UNIX platforms are stored in IDL preferences rather than in X resources. See IDL System Preferences (IDL Reference Guide) for a detailed description of IDL's preferences system.

Not all X resources have corresponding preference values. Generally speaking, the X resource values that have not been implemented as preferences either control the way in which Motif system widgets such as the File Selection dialog are drawn or the way in which Motif widgets used by IDL behave (key bindings and scrolling behavior, for example). While the system default Idl X resource file contains settings for some of these resources, there should be very few occasions when IDL users need to modify the values.