Re: bigger cursor?

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> I want to increase the size of my mouse cursor under X.

Pointer cursors are under the control of clients.  You'll have to
convince the various clients you care about to use larger cursors.
(With one possible exception - see below.)

Depending on how they're written, there may or may not be any small
number of things you can change to do this.  For example, if they're
all Gnome programs, there may be a Gnome thing which you can set to
affect them all.

Otherwise, you'll have to figure out how to convince the clients you
care about to use larger cursors.  Depending on the clients, this may
be anywhere from trivial to approximately impossible.

> I found various descriptions:
> http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/HOWTO_Large_Mouse_Cursors
> and
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/X11_Cursors

The former describes a few examples of the sort of thing I was talking
about above.  (The latter I can't read, because it's HTTPS.)

> While looking at this I noted that we don't provide any cursor themes
> with native X.

X is not a window system; X is an infrastructure for building window
systems.  As this implies, X does not have cursor themes, though some
window systems built using X may.  As far as I can tell, NetBSD ships
X, with perhaps one of the most rudimentary window systems built with
it (a bunch of clients and a primitive window manager or two); I doubt
any of them have anything like cursor themes.  If I'm right about that
for the version you're using, you'd have to go to pkgsrc to get a fancy
window system, and the answers to your questions would depend on which
one you use.

For that matter, the same is true of Linux; the page you refer to above
makes assumptions about the window system the user is using; notice
that, for example, it has different sections for Gnome and
Enlightenment.  (The "Manual" and "Gcursor" sections appear to be
making assumptions about the window system the user is using, probably
that it is one shipped with, or recommended by, the distro in
question.)

The exception I mentioned above is that an X server does have the
right, if it wants, to do anything it pleases to client-specified
pointer cursors, including enlarging some or all of them.  (To quote
one doc file I have handy, "[t]he components of the cursor can be
transformed arbitrarily to meet display limitations".)  I don't know of
any X servers that take advantage of this freedom, but that's not to
say none exist.

And, of course, there may be extensions that have bearing on this.  I
know of none, but I don't even try to keep up with extensions to X, so
that means nothing.

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