On Fri, 21 May 1999, Chris Brown wrote:

> Actually, the way it usually works (not specifically sure about NetBSD
> because I haven't installed X on any of my boxes yet) is that there is a
> system wide default file that starts up an xterm and a window manager.
> You can override it by making a file in your home directory called
> either .xinitrc or .Xclients (depending on how the X startup scripts are programmed).

With the standard NetBSD distribution, ~/.xinitrc is invoked by the
"startx" method; ~/.xsession gets invoked by xdm.

The behavior of "xdm" is set, by default, in
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/xdm-config, which simply pulls in files from
that directory. The system-wide behavior of "startx" is set in
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/{xinitrc, xserverrc}.