I've been looking for information on the X cursor themes, and there is almost no information at the spec draft: <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards/cursor-spec">http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards/cursor-spec </a> I would like to explain my experience in order to argue some points that I want to discuss. I have a Gentoo box, and wanted to set a cursor theme for my user. After some hard googling, I found this: <a href="http://ports.openbsd.nu/x11/xcursor-themes"> http://ports.openbsd.nu/x11/xcursor-themes</a> Which is an OpenBSD tutorial for xcursor themes, it was the only page that I've found to know that XCURSOR_PATH and XCURSOR_THEME existed (both are not on the draft). Then I wanted to know, where was the default path and theme, and I realized that it was harcoded into the libXcursor, on the src/library.c file with ths: #ifndef ICONDIR #define ICONDIR "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/icons" #endif #ifndef XCURSORPATH #define XCURSORPATH "~/.icons:/usr/share/icons:/usr/share/pixmaps:"ICONDIR #endif Why does the default cursor path is the same than the icon themes path? Then I realized that index.theme files uses "[Icon Theme]" section to determine the default theme. Why does the default section is the same than the icon index.theme files? Icons and cursors are different things (in fact, I have never seen any bundled icon+cursor theme distribution). I think that make this follow the XDG_DATA*/cursors/ like themes and icons, and have their own theme.index section would be a better idea than the actual scheme. Thanks, -- Un saludo, Alberto Ruiz