Glenn McIntosh wrote:
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).
I cannot reproduce this issue with xinit /usr/bin/xterm -ms cyan -cr magenta -fg yellow -bg black on oneric (don't ask), without gdm or any other dm installed. I see a cyan I-bar with a black border around it (due to because -bg black). This (obviously) only affects the pointer while it is over the xterm; outside of there it is the default fat "X" shape. However I reckon I just worked out what it is. X pointers are now themable, and I expect you have an X pointer theme installed. Since they're PNGs (with alpha transparency, whoop-de-doo!) you can't just set fg/bg colours of the pointer while they're on. Once upon a time I had notes on how to customize that; I can't find them now. Back then, IIRC, they were customized host-wide via update-alternatives; I notice from apt-file that GTK3 appears to also have per-theme pointers now in /usr/share/icons/Adwaita/cursors.