• "classic" Xcursor theme?

    From Ivan Shmakov@21:1/5 to All on Sun Apr 7 18:12:28 2019
    Curiously, is there a "classic" Xcursor theme available from
    somewhere? That is, a theme with monochrome cursors with the
    same look as the "native" X cursors, perhaps with one or more
    different sizes available as well?

    Barring that, is there a clean way to disable Xcursor? So far,
    about the only workaround I've found is to point the XCURSOR_PATH
    environment variable to a non-existent directory, e. g., in my
    ~/.xsession.

    --
    FSF associate member #7257 http://am-1.org/~ivan/

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  • From Eli the Bearded@21:1/5 to ivan@siamics.net on Mon Apr 8 00:57:53 2019
    In comp.windows.x, Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.net> wrote:
    Curiously, is there a "classic" Xcursor theme available from
    somewhere? That is, a theme with monochrome cursors with the
    same look as the "native" X cursors, perhaps with one or more
    different sizes available as well?

    Looking at Xcursor theme tutorials it seems like you could just convert
    the bitmaps for the cursorfont to pngs and be 90% there.

    Barring that, is there a clean way to disable Xcursor? So far,
    about the only workaround I've found is to point the XCURSOR_PATH
    environment variable to a non-existent directory, e. g., in my
    ~/.xsession.

    Use a different window manager? I use icewm and have pure old-school
    cursors.

    $ echo 'Xtermtest*pointerShape: trek' >> ~/.Xdefaults
    $ xterm -name Xtermtest
    # new xterm has the stupidest cursor shape in the font instead of the
    # nice clean I beam shape.

    Elijah
    ------
    '*pointerShape: shuttle' is a close second

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  • From Ivan Shmakov@21:1/5 to All on Wed Apr 10 17:40:36 2019
    Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> writes:
    In comp.windows.x, Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.net> wrote:

    Curiously, is there a "classic" Xcursor theme available from
    somewhere? That is, a theme with monochrome cursors with the same
    look as the "native" X cursors, perhaps with one or more different
    sizes available as well?

    Looking at Xcursor theme tutorials it seems like you could just
    convert the bitmaps for the cursorfont to pngs and be 90% there.

    Indeed; I now see there's xcursorgen(1) in x11-apps, thanks.

    I guess it'd make sense to try to generate cursors with larger
    dimensions, given the higher screen resolutions currently in use.

    Barring that, is there a clean way to disable Xcursor? So far,
    about the only workaround I've found is to point the XCURSOR_PATH
    environment variable to a non-existent directory, e. g., in my
    ~/.xsession.

    Use a different window manager? I use icewm and have pure old-school cursors.

    That's interesting; my guess was that new-style cursors were
    requested by the applications explicitly -- as suggested by the
    fact that, say, $ XCURSOR_PATH=/nowhere xedit & resulted in an
    Xedit starting unaffected by them. (And accesses to the Xcursor
    directories showing in strace(1) output spoke in favor this
    conclusion as well.) But it seems to be more complicated than
    that, as some programs do not appear to be linked against
    libXcursor, yet still show decidedly non-classic cursors.

    Conversely, Firefox employs such cursor regardless of how (or if)
    the WM treats them.

    Then again, libX11 isn't /linked/ against libXcursor -- but it
    references the latter by name, per $ strings output. (Now, also
    seeing all the *-theme dependencies in Debian, I'm eager to try
    adding "path-exclude /usr/share/icons/*" to dpkg.cfg and see if
    anything breaks.)

    Finally, I'm not always at liberty to choose a WM I wish for the
    systems I work with, so a way to opt out independent of the WM
    choice would still be handy.

    $ echo 'Xtermtest*pointerShape: trek' >> ~/.Xdefaults
    $ xterm -name Xtermtest

    new xterm has the stupidest cursor shape in the font instead of the
    nice clean I beam shape.

    As was pointed earlier in this newsgroup, it's easier to just:

    $ xterm -xrm "*pointerShape: trek"

    (Then again, apparently ~/.Xdefaults is not read when $ xrdb -query
    is non-empty.)

    Curiously, XTerm is about the only X application that doesn't
    seem to use Xcursor regardless of the settings.

    '*pointerShape: shuttle' is a close second

    I've always thought of 'gumby' as ridiculously out of place.

    --
    FSF associate member #7257 http://am-1.org/~ivan/

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  • From Ivan Shmakov@21:1/5 to All on Fri May 19 22:31:00 2023
    XPost: alt.os.linux.debian

    On 2019-04-10, Ivan Shmakov wrote:
    Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> writes:
    In comp.windows.x, Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.net> wrote:

    Barring that, is there a clean way to disable Xcursor? So far,
    about the only workaround I've found is to point the XCURSOR_PATH
    environment variable to a non-existent directory, e. g., in my
    ~/.xsession.

    (Still haven't figured it out. On my own Debian installs, the
    workaround below seems to work.)

    Use a different window manager? I use icewm and have pure old-school
    cursors.

    That's interesting; my guess was that new-style cursors were
    requested by the applications explicitly -- as suggested by the
    fact that, say, $ XCURSOR_PATH=/nowhere xedit & resulted in an
    Xedit starting unaffected by them. But it seems to be more
    complicated than that, as some programs do not appear to be linked
    against libXcursor, yet still show decidedly non-classic cursors.

    Conversely, Firefox employs such cursor regardless of how (or if)
    the WM treats them.

    Then again, libX11 isn't /linked/ against libXcursor -- but it
    references the latter by name, per $ strings output.

    (Now, also seeing all the *-theme dependencies in Debian, I'm
    eager to try adding "path-exclude /usr/share/icons/*" to dpkg.cfg
    and see if anything breaks.)

    It does; in particular, /usr/share/icons/Adwaita/16x16/actions/
    has icons used by common toolkit dialogs and whatnot, and while
    some programs might be happy to show user an empty icon if one
    cannot be loaded from there, others just crash in such a case.

    Still, I've been using path-exclude=/usr/share/icons/*/cursor/*
    for years now without any apparent ill effects. Alongside the
    following, just to conserve some blocks and inodes.

    path-exclude=/usr/share/icons/*/???x???/* path-exclude=/usr/share/icons/*/scalable/*

    --
    FSF associate member #7257 http://am-1.org/~ivan/

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