Changing the look of X cursors

[rzheka]

For some reason I didn't like the standard X mouse cursors (black arrow and some other "strange" arrows). There's a way to change them, for all applications. X apps usually don't create cursors by themselves, they just query the X server for some predefined cursors. "Images" of these are stored in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/cursor.pcf.gz. It's a regular pcf font, and you can replace it with your own. I've created an example of such replacemnt here: http://www.geocities.com/sahklk/cursor.pcf.gz, with white arrow instead of black and other strange-looking cursors. Looks like in one well-known OS
To install:
1. Move /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/cursor.pcf.gz to cursor.pcf.gz.old
2. Install new cursor.pcf.gz
3. Restart X
Some words about creating your own cursor font. I don't know if there's a tool for editing *.pcf fonts, but there are a lot of tools for *.bdf (my choice is xmbdfed, http://crl.nmsu.edu/~mleisher/xmbdfed.html). You can convert cursor.pcf to bdf, edit it, then convert back to pcf.

[ghetto]

Your link doesnt seem to be working anymore.. but your post got me curious as to what a white cursor would look like on the desktop so I tracked down the white cursor font.

You can find it here:
http://www.kdenews.org/999319509/999397635/

and although this is spoken of as a kde cursor font it works just as nicely on Gnome as it does for KDE .. at least it has for me so far.

Enjoy.

ps. Following the instructions in the gentoo post by rzheka works fine.. just make sure you rename your old font before copying the new font to the directory or else you'll be stuck with the white cursor for the rest of your natural life... muwahahah..

[rzheka]

Heh... It's geocities
Just do "save links as" in your browser or download with wget/nt/your_favourite_tool

[S_aIN_t]

thanks this works.. good work

[Lockup]

can we use regular windows one with that though? (sorry, not really familiar with cursor editing:P and there was a nice animated one i had with the Aston shell replacement...wondering if i could convert/use it somehow)
edit: just checked in my windows folder and its .ani cursors, would those work?