XFree resources allow presetting preferences of most clients in ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xresources. These files are merged into the resources database by running xrdb -merge ~/.Xresource. Resources that are recognized by a client are usually documented in the accompanying man page.
The positions and size of the window of an X client is controlled by the -geometry switch.
Imagine you need to create the file -o but observe the following.
Filenames with spaces proove to be a major pita because many code constructs do not properly handle them.
Colour escape sequences are useful for designing text user interfaces (TUI).
Modern keyboard offer so called multimedia keys which allow direct control over the browser or media player. But the keycodes which are generated by the individual keys are usually unknown to the system and, therefore, ignored.
Instead of letting tar recursively add files to the archive simply provide a file list on stdin.
Subversion has a built-in protocol variant that automatically tunnels repository access through SSH to the specified host.
Instead of connecting to a pserver CVS can be tunnelled through SSH to protect the versioned data.
Here is an example how to archive files removing leading directory names.