Customizing the SAS Windowing Environment

Methods for Customizing X Resources

The following list describes the methods that you can use to customize X resources.

Use the Font dialog box, the Preferences dialog box, or the Resource Helper to customize your SAS session. All of these tools write X resource definitions out to a location that SAS will read the next time you start a SAS session. See Modifying X Resources Through the Preferences Dialog Box, Setting X Resources with the Resource Helper, and Customizing Fonts in UNIX Environments for more information on these tools.

Note: The settings that you specify in the Preferences dialog box will override any command line settings.
Specify session-specific resources by using the -xrm option on the command line for each invocation of SAS. For example, the following command specifies that SAS will not display the Confirm dialog box when you exit your SAS session:
```
sas -xrm 'SAS.confirmSASExit: False'
```
You can specify the -xrm option as many times as needed. You must specify the -xrm option for each resource.

Note: If you normally invoke SAS with a shell script, you should protect the quotation marks from the shell with the backslash (\) character:
```
sasscript -xrm \'SAS.confirmSASExit: False\'
```
Add resource definitions to a file in your home directory. If you place resources in a file that X Toolkit normally searches for when applications are invoked, these resources will be loaded when you invoke SAS. For information about where the X Toolkit searches for resources, see the documentation for the X Window System.

You can also add resources to the resource database after SAS has initialized by running the xrdb utility. For example, the following command merges the definitions in the MyResources file into the resource database:
```
xrdb -merge myresources
```
Create a subdirectory for storing resource definitions. (This subdirectory is usually named app-defaults.) Set the XUSERFILESEARCHPATH environment variable to the pathname of this subdirectory. You can use %N to substitute an application class name for a file when specifying the XUSERFILESEARCHPATH environment variable. Specify the definition for this environment variable in the initialization file for your shell (for example, the $HOME/.login, $HOME/.cshrc, or $HOME/.profile files), to ensure that the XUSERFILESEARCHPATH variable is defined for each shell that is started.

Create a file called SAS in the subdirectory identified by XUSERFILESEARCHPATH. Include your resource definitions in this file.

Note: Alternatively, you could set the XAPPLRESDIR environment variable to the pathname of the subdirectory that stores your resource definitions. The XAPPLRESDIR and XUSERFILESEARCHPATH environment variables use a slightly different syntax to specify the location of your resource definitions. The location specified by the XUSERFILESEARCH environment variable takes precedence over the location specified by the XAPPLRESDIR variable. For more information, see the UNIX X man page.
If you want the customized resource definitions to be used for all users on a particular host, create a file called SAS to contain your resource definitions, and store this file in the system app-defaults directory.

For more information about X resources, see the X Window System documentation supplied by your vendor or to other documentation about the X Window System.

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