Xresources not loaded under MATE desktop

Question

I have colours set for my urxvt terminal in my .Xresources. I know this file works because manually running xrdb ~/.Xresources produces the expected result.

I have tried putting xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources EVERYWHERE (~/.{xprofile,xsession,xsessionrc,xinitrc}) to no avail.

Answer 1

TL;DR

Use dconf-editor (or whatever other xsettings editor you have) to set the attribute active to false under org.mate.SettingsDaemon.plugins.xrdb.

Your DM should load the .Xresources file as a part of its session wrapper. Otherwise add it to your .xprofile or .xsessionrc on Debian.

Explanation below:

So I snapped and replaced my xrdb binary with a bash script that logged the calling process, time stamp and arguments to a file.

It showed my xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources actually being executed followed by mate-settings-daemon. I verified this with xrdb -query which lo and behold actually showed my settings except that background and foreground had been overridden.

So I googled and found the source to mate-settings-daemon: https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-settings-daemon/blob/master/plugins/xrdb/msd-xrdb-manager.c#L which also loads my settings file but then overrides stuff with theme colours!

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

So dconf-editor finds org.mate.SettingsDaemon.plugins.xrdb with the attribute active setting this to false fixes the issue.