The way to use system cursor and custom(client) cursor

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:54:57 -0700
Bill Spitzak <spitzak at gmail.com> wrote:

> Pekka Paalanen wrote:
> 
> > I guess the question for the Wayland developer community is, do we
> > want such cursor theme settings in the shell protocol, or is that
> > something that should be left for DEs to solve in their own
> > configuration systems?
> 
> Any solution should involve everything the user calls "themes".
> 
> Historically clients that did nothing automatically get the "theme"
> for the cursor and for the window borders. But they had to write a
> whole lot of code to change the "theme" for the button widgts.
> 
> This historical artifact has led to lots of people saying these are 
> somehow special and therefore there must be special api in Wayland
> for them. But this is illogical, the user sees no difference between
> them, so any solution must solve the buttons and every other "theme".
> 
> So there should be no special "this is the cursor theme" api in
> Wayland.
> 
> If some genius out there can design a "this is the entire theme" api 
> then maybe Wayland can do that. But I suspect any attempt will by
> like .Xdefaults and be just as useless.
> 
> So I suspect leaving it for the DE's to solve would be the right 
> approach.

Bill, for once, I agree with you.

Elvis, looks like it would be a long road to solve in a standard way,
or even on a per toolkit/DE basis. The only thing existing applications
can generally support for now is to restart all Wayland clients for
reloading the cursor theme based on file symlinks (the server can keep
on running, if it does not load any cursors itself).


Thanks,
pq