Mouse cursor size

Paul King pking123-rieW9WUcm8FFJ04o6PK0Fg at public.gmane.org
Wed Mar 17 04:48:04 UTC 2004


I know this is a bit of a kludge, but I recall in a much older version of UNIX 
(Solaris, actually) using X11R4 and X11R5 (mid 80s), that allowed any user to 
redesign their cursor using just a bitmap editor. THough this would be 
impractical, you could even bitmap entire graphics (as two-colour graphics of 
course), and so long as you declared a "hot point" where the clicking would 
have an effect, you had yourself a mouse cursor. I should know, since I did the 
impractical a few times. When I was an Enya fan, I downloaded a small Enya 
graphic from Sunsite (when they used to have a graphics repository), and I had 
myself a cursor that was in the range of 100x150 pixels. The software used was 
xv (yes, xv does go at least that far back in UNIX history), and the hotpoint 
was set using a bitmap editor called "bitmap".

What you need are actually two graphics: one for the graphic, and another for a 
"mask". Your graphic need not be any particular shape. Enya had transparent 
areas around the edges so that you didn't know it was rectangular, but wherever 
there were groups of white pixels, they were surrounded by a border of black 
pixels (the mask) so you would see the cursor regardless of the background.

The settings for the new cursor were placed --- oh, I forget where... I *think* 
it was in your .xinitrc file, and I think the command that did it was xsetroot. 
Do a "man xsetroot" for details.

Paul King

> >
> >
> >I am running Mandrake 9.2 as well. Under Configuration/Other/Cursor Themes 
> >there is a theme called YCursors that  might do the trick. 
> >
> >Duncan
> >
> I don't see that option on either my machine or hers. I'm wondering 
> whether its a package that I have to install as an extra.
> 
> Also I've recently downloaded Mandrake 10.0 and its showing some promise.
> 
> I've emailed the folks at KDE to see if they can shed some light since 
> they do offer a larger cursor (not large enough, though) as one of the 
> options in KDE "Look and Feel" -- I've yet to hear back from them.
> 
> John
> 
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=========================================================
Paul King              http://www3.sympatico.ca/pking123/


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