xterm pointer resources -- a solution and a rant

[Tim Writer]

David Tilbrook <dt-hKuJ9UrQZDM at public.gmane.org> writes:

> Dickey pointed me to two web pages:
> 
> 	http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/RELNOTES2.html#5
> and
> 	http://www.cs.umn.edu/help/linux/xcursor.html
> 
> The latter gave clues and after some trials I came up
> with the solution which is to add:
> 
> 	Xcursor.core: true
> 
> to my .Xresources file.

Thanks for tracking this down.  It's been bugging me for a while that my
xterm pointer is a semi-transparent version of its old self.  It's not too
bad on my CRT but on my laptop LCD it's almost invisible and I often lose it.
The only problem with this solution is that modifying the Xcursor resources
modifies the cursors for all applications.  Themes are fine but it seems to
me I should be able to override them for specific applications.  I checked
the xterm docs and (short of recompilong w/o Xcursor support) there doesn't
seem to be any way to use traditional cursors only in xterm.

> Now why didn't I think of that?
> 
> Rant on {
> It's bull**** like this that will continue to plague linux.
> 
> All it took was four or five letters to a mailing list of a large
> group of linux experts####### fans, a letter to the software's
> maintainer, perusing the xterm source, consulting a bunch of web pages,
> and some experimentation to get something working again after
> making the mistake of upgrading.  I guess my 16 years of using
> X10 and X11 just isn't enough.

Don't get me started.

Why are their so many terminal applications?  None of them (including
gnome-terminal and konsole) work very well compared with xterm.  They look
pretty but their terminal emulation sucks and they're resource pigs.  And I
can get all the fancy multi-screen features (and more) by running screen
inside xterm (which I routinely do).

Speaking of resources, why have KDE and GNOME foresaken X resources for
config files (KDE) and the gconf abomination (GNOME)?  In the "old days"
(i.e. before KDE and GNOME), you could configure your applications via X
resources which were then loaded into the resource property of your display.
This was a nice design because it meant, in a networked environment, that
your applications all looked the same regardless of which system they were
running on.  Now, with KDE and GNOME, you have to configure your applications
on every system.  A shared home directory used to be the solution to this
problem but that's not realistic in todays mobile environment and, unless
you're running the exact same version of a given application on every machine
with a shared config, bad things tend to happen.  It seems to me that in the
mad rush to "compete with" Windows, we're copying many of its mistakes.

Like I said, don't get me started.

> Rant off }
> 
> Now, where was I?
> 
> -- dt

-- 
tim writer <tim-s/rLXaiAEBtBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org>                                  starnix inc.
905.771.0017 ext. 225                           thornhill, ontario, canada
http://www.starnix.com              professional linux services & products
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