Cursor conventions spec

Keith Packard keithp at keithp.com
Wed Oct 15 02:48:04 EEST 2003


I don't have any idea whether the included cursors are necessary and 
sufficient, but I do have other comments...

X-cursor:	let's get rid of this one; it's just confusing.  I can
		make the X server start up with a different image by
		default -- having the X server use the Xcursor library to
		load the 'default' cursor from the default theme is one
		simple idea.

right-arrow:	given the defintion (inverted version of default), it seems
		like the name could be 'inverted-default' or some such.

The others seem fine to me.  I suggest that we also define 'fall-back' 
rules for each of the default cursors so that a theme may present fewer 
cursors and yet still get each standard cursor represented by the theme.

Then I'd like to get an idea of how more general cursor aliasing should 
work; the current 'symlink' method is horribly broken.  While we could 
place this information in the index.theme file, I was wondering if we 
shouldn't create special alias cursor files instead; separate files are 
generally easier for software installation scripts to deal with.

Finally, we should probably address the cursor file format.  The current 
format is rather expensive as the cursors are all uncompressed, it's also 
limited to bitmap images when it might be nice to also permit SVG versions.

-keith





More information about the xdg mailing list