Xresources should have a newline at the end

Phenomenon

Today, after I started KDE, the cursor became extremely small in some applications, such as konsole, KDE system settings, Anki, KDE desktop. However when the cursor was in GTK based applications such as Firefox, its size was normal. I tried to change the cursor size in KDE system settings but got no effect.

Analysis

Remembering that I modified the menu font used by Emacs yesterday by editing $HOME/.Xresources, I doubt this may be the cause.

Xpdf*paperColor: rgb:f6/f0/de
Xpdf*fontList: -adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--35-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
gv*font: -adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--35-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
Xft.dpi: 161
Emacs.pane.menubar.font: Noto Sans CJK SC-12
Emacs.menu*.font: Noto Sans CJK SC-12
Emacs.dialog*.font: Noto Sans CJK SC-12

So I execute xrdb -query | grep -i cursor to check cursor related settings in the X server resource database and get this:

Emacs.dialog*.font:     Noto Sans CJK SC-12Xcursor.theme: WhiteSur-cursors
Xcursor.size:   48

The configuration for the cursor theme has been mixed with the Emacs dialog font configuration. It is obvious that when I ran xrdb -merge $HOME/.Xresources, the system configuration was appended to my configuration without adding a new line.

Cause and solution

Yesterday I edited $HOME/.Xresources in Emacs using the conf-xdefaults-mode. In this mode, the Emacs variable require-final-newline is nil, while other modes I often use, such as org-mode, c++-mode, etc., set this variable to t.

Solution: manually adding a newline to the end of $HOME/.Xresources and running xrdb -load $HOME/.Xresources. With this -load option, previous values will be overwritten.