xrdb and Xresources
 

Hi LQ.org! Arch wiki says: “To reread your .Xresources file, and throw away your old resources: "xrdb ~/.Xresources". To reread your .Xresources file, and keep your old resources: "xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources"”. And then a bit further: “If you do not use a desktop environment, you probably need to add the following line to your ~/.xinitrc: "[[ -f ~/.Xresources ]] && xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources"”. I don't have any DE, only IceWM. So I wonder what's the difference for me in booting with this command with "-merge" or without it?

booting ?

-merge will keep any predefined settings which may be automatically loaded depending upon your distro when X is started.

some distros do not load a predefined file, I assume there may be at least 1 distro out there that does load their own specific Xresources. I do not know if arch loads it's own file.

Not unless you tell it to ;)

@OP: ~/.xinitrc is parsed by some display managers and if they too are setting resource options then the new ones should be `-merge`d rather than supplant these.