On Tue, 20 Mar 2012 23:06:53 +1100, Erik Christiansen <dvalin@internode.on.net> wrote:
After a couple of decades of running xterms with "-fg yellow -bg darkslategrey", I'm finding it harder to locate the mouse pointer when it's over text, even if I thrash the rat, to try to detect the motion. So I added "-ms red" to the xterm invocation. But that little I-like pointer remains white with a black border.
I can also replicate this behaviour on Debian. On two machines running Debian Squeeze (stable) and another running Debian Wheezy (testing), the '-ms' flag of xterm appears to have no effect. These machines all have gdm3 installed, and are running a reasonably default Gnome desktop. Even if I shutdown the desktop and windows manager, and run xterm on these machines on a plain X server, the mouse pointer color is not affected by the flag. However, on my own desktop, which is also running Debian Squeeze, but has no display manager and uses fluxbox as the window manager, the '-ms' flag works as expected (setting the inner color of the mouse pointer). If I ssh into one of the machines that doesn't work as expected (ie, piping X over ssh to my own desktop X server), the remotely running term is stuck with a white cursor, even though its display window is on X on my local desktop. Whereas if I run an term on another Debian machine (again X over ssh) that has no X server installed, I can set the color of the xterm mouse pointer, again the display window on my local desktop. Glenn -- pool.sks-keyservers.net 0xb1e82ec9228ac090