GTK+ provides resource file mechanism for configuring various aspects of the operation of a program at runtime. Most of the time, though, resource files are used for changing styles of the application's widgets. Application should load its resource file using rc_parse() function: ]]> This will load myapp.rc file loaded in the same directory as the application. A resource file defines a number of styles and attaches them to particular widgets. The attachment is done by the widget, widget_class, and class declarations. As an example of such a statement: This attaches the style "my-entry-class" to all widgets whose widget class matches the pattern "mywindow.*.GtkEntry". The patterns are given in the standard shell glob syntax. The "?" wildcard matches any character, while "*" matches zero or more of any character. The three types of matching are against the widget path, the class path and the class heirarchy. Both the widget and the class paths consists of a "." separated list of all the parents of the widget and the widget itself from outermost to innermost. The difference is that in the widget path, the name assigned by GtkWiget::set_name() is used if present, otherwise the class name of the widget, while for the widget path, the class name is always used.