9.5.1 Settings and the .pdpinitrc and .cssinitrc Files

Every time the PDP++ software starts up, it looks for a `.cssinitrc' and a `.pdpinitrc' file in the user's home directory. These files contain CSS script code that can set various default settings, set aliases for CSS commands, etc (see also section 7.4.3 CSS Startup options). A list of the different settings that can be put into the `.pdpinitrc' file is given in section 6.17 Settings Affecting GUI Behavior. These settings are actually "static" members located in the taMisc object, and are set in CSS as in the following example:

taMisc::display_width = 90;

Another thing that you might want to put in the `.pdpinitrc' is your default color specification:

.colorspecs.SetDefaultElName("C_ColdHot");

Finally, if you have put a set of PDP++ files (like the defaults files described in the next section, for example) in a directory somewhere, you can add this directory to the list of those automatically searched when loading CSS script files and defaults files. This is done with the include_paths member of the taMisc object that holds all of the other settings parameters. It is an array of strings, and you simply add a new string to it to add a new path:

taMisc::include_paths.AddUnique("/home/mach/me/pdp++/defaults");

Note that the environmental variable PDPDIR should be set to the directory in which PDP++ was installed in order to have the default include paths be correct. If PDPDIR is not set, the default is `/usr/local/pdp++'.