Different cursor _themes_ for multiple pointers?

[Antonio Ospite]

On Fri, 15 Jan 2010 09:31:58 +1000
Peter Hutterer <peter.hutterer at who-t.net> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 11:20:16PM +0100, Antonio Ospite wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > inspired by a previous discussion[1] I've written a dumb tool to control
> > cursors for multiple pointers with Xcursor and XInput2:
> > http://git.ao2.it/xicursorset.git/?a=blob;f=xicursorset.c;hb=HEAD
> > 
> > Now I have a question, would it be possible to change the whole cursor
> > theme for an arbitrary pointer in a multi-pointer setup?
> 
> last I checked, cursors are simply XIDs that are assigned to a device. all
> the theme handling is done on the client side, isn't it?
>

That means it's WM (or toolkit, or application) responsibility to change
cursor shape to indicate some state change, right?

> so you might have to shuffle around a bit switching cursor themes before
> loading but there's no server-side support necessary for this. Of course,
> you could extend the Xcursor spec and API to hold multiple cursor themes
> simultaneously, which may be the right thing to do long-term.
>

I guess, so clients can know which theme is globally assigned to each
pointer. I was thinking naively to something like:
XcursorBool \
      XIcursorSetTheme(Display *dpy, int deviceid, const char *theme);
char *XIcursorGetTheme(Display *dpy, int deviceid);

I don't know it that fits into XInput2 (like XIDefineCursor) or in
Xcursor itself, and anyways I need to learn a lot about X before making
any serious proposal.

> Cheers,
>   Peter

Slightly OT: I've written a blog post to roughly summarize the
current state of multi-pointer support on a (GNOME) Desktop, it's more
targeted at users, but developers might take some hints too:
http://ao2.it/en/blog/2010/01/19/poor-mans-multi-touch-using-multiple-mice-xorg

Thanks,
   Antonio

-- 
Antonio Ospite
http://ao2.it

PGP public key ID: 0x4553B001

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