[solved] Can't change mouse color

[Tony0945]

Alternating booting Mate and Openbox.

I want a white cursor.
Xdm shows a white cursor in the greeter (good!)
If I launch Mate from XDM it still has a white cursor (good!)
If I launch Openbox with pcmanfm it shows a black cursor (bad!, hard to see against dark blue background, impossible against black background)
I've tried the settings listed in the wiki (redglass) no effect. I've tried various Fedora and Ubuntu settings, most don''t even exist in Gentoo.
And, of course, there are detailed instructions on using Gnome/KDE GUI's (click this, click that ...)

Here is ~/.Xresources

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~ $ cat ~/.Xresources
!xterm*font:     *-fixed-*-*-*-18-*
xterm*faceName: DejaVuSansMono:size=24:antialias=false
xterm*reverseVideo: on
!xterm*VT100.geometry: 80x32
xterm*foreground: #000000
xterm*background: #AAAAAA
!fix cut and paste
xterm*selectToClipboard: true
! set cursor
Xcursor.size: 16
Xcursor.theme: redglass
Xcursor.themes: whiteglass

Note: wiki says to use Xcursor.theme, a forum post says to use Xcursor.themes

Here is ~/.config/openbox/autostart

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~ $ cat ~/.config/openbox/autostart

DESKTOP_ENV="OPENBOX"

xscreensaver &
pcmanfm --desktop &
mate-panel &		  #conventional mate panel, works except for logout

Obconf would probably show a setting, but it was removed from portage because of python 2.7

Can someone help me with this? I like the setup better than the highly integrated Mate, all essential applications run, but the mouse is very hard to see!
It's okay on the forum with the gray background, but not on the desktop unless I set a very light background.

[Ant P.]

I've got a "xrdb -merge $HOME/.Xresources" line in openbox's autostart. Some desktops do that automatically.

[Anon-E-moose]

You usually have to bounce the X server after a Xcursor change.

[Tony0945]

Ant P. , no change. I tried not launching mate-panel and not launching pcmanfm. Neither of those worked.

Anon-E-Moose, I tried "service restart xdm" afterer each change. No dice. eventually I resorted to "reboot". Still no change.

Should the line be "Xcursor.themes: redglass" or "Xcursor.theme: redglass" or possibly a lower case x. I've seen it all sorts of ways on DuckDuckGo.

Is there any command to print out the present value of these settings?

I didn't try "env-update" but that should have come for free with a reboot".

[Ant P.]

Is there any command to print out the present value of these settings?

xrdb -query

Note that that only shows you the *current* values, not whatever the misbehaving program saw at startup.

[Tony0945]

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~ $ xrdb -query
Xcursor.size:	16
Xcursor.themes:	redglass
xterm*background:	#AAAAAA
xterm*faceName:	DejaVuSansMono:size=24:antialias=false
xterm*foreground:	#000000
xterm*reverseVideo:	on
xterm*selectToClipboard:	true

Interesting. I don't know what the mouse is supposed to look like, but "redglass" sounds like something should be red!
The mouse cursor is black with a whiteborder. I'll experiment with cursor size and see if it has any effect.
BTW xterm is black with white letters. Don't know how that aligns with #AAAAAA and #000000
The xterm font does seem visually twice as big as the mate-terminal font which is Monospace 12 (changeable by internal menu)

[Ant P.]

fwiw, in my .Xresources I've got "Xcursor.theme: Vanilla-DMZ-AA" (no s), and that works. If my memory's correct the redglass theme is actually red.

You can use lxappearance to preview the ones you have installed, just avoid clicking apply in there because it scribbles over your gtk2/3 config if you have any.

[Anon-E-moose]

You can manually set your cursor package too (if you don't have something like lxappearance)

This is left over from when I used to run lxde

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$ cat .icons/default/index.theme 
# This file is written by LXAppearance. Do not edit.
[Icon Theme]
Name=Default
Comment=Default Cursor Theme
Inherits=DeepSky

The Inherits line is for the Cursor, in my case pointing to my own icon directory ~/.icons/DeepSky/cursors

[Anon-E-moose]

BTW xterm is black with white letters. Don't know how that aligns with #AAAAAA and #000000

000000 is black and AAAAAA are kind of gray

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xterm*foreground:       White
xterm*background:       Black
...
urxvt*foreground:       White
!! urxvt*background:        grey25
urxvt*background:       Black

[CaptainBlood]

Side note, likely off-topic:

Obconf would probably show a setting, but it was removed from portage because of python 2.7

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eix "x11-misc/obconf"
[I] x11-misc/obconf
     Available versions:  2.0.4 **9999*l {nls}
     Installed versions:  2.0.4(01:44:47 17/03/2020)(nls)

remains available here.
Maybe I missing something...
Thks 4 ur attention, interest & support.

[Tony0945]

CaptainBlood,
Yes, it installed today. A few days ago it failed with a python error. Don't know why.

Anon-E-Moose,
I can't find any mouse themes installed. I'll have to research that more.
"theme vs themes" Again, I've seen it both ways via google, for Arch, Ubuntu, Fedora and even the Gentoo Forum.

Lots of posting problems this morning. Finally traced to a loose keyboard USB plug. The cordless models are better.

[Anon-E-moose]

/usr/share/cursors/xorg-x11/Adwaita/cursors
/usr/share/cursors/xorg-x11/Obsidian/cursors
/usr/share/cursors/xorg-x11/gentoo-blue/cursors
/usr/share/cursors/xorg-x11/gentoo-silver/cursors
/usr/share/cursors/xorg-x11/gentoo/cursors

Edit to add: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Cursor_themes

[Tony0945]

Thanks, Anon-E-Moose. I'll try messing with that.

It does indeed seem to be capital X and no s on theme. That's the way it was listed in my /etc/X11/xdm/Xresources.
I changed it from whiteglass to redglass and immedietly the xdm login screen changed to red cursor. No reload required.
Logging in to Mate, the cursor changes to white.
Openbox changes to black
Fluxbox stays red.

I added these lines to /etc/X11/Sessions/openbox to make it consistent with the other DM's

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userresources=$HOME/.Xresources
usermodmap=$HOME/.Xmodmap
userxkbmap=$HOME/.Xkbmap

sysresources=/etc/X11/Xresources
sysmodmap=/etc/X11/Xmodmap
sysxkbmap=/etc/X11/Xkbmap

but it didn't help.
Again commenting out mate-desktop and pcmanfm didn't help. The big black screen has a black mouse cursor with a white outline.

I'll experiment with the mouse themes you posted.

[Anon-E-moose]

Read the link from arch wiki, it's got a lot of info in it.

[Anon-E-moose]

Just tried changing my cursor theme to gentoo-silver (looks nice BTW)

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 $ cat ~/.icons/default/index.theme 
# This file is written by LXAppearance. Do not edit.
[Icon Theme]
Name=Default
Comment=Default Cursor Theme
Inherits=gentoo-silver
#Inherits=DeepSky

and restarting X (the server requires a restart to pick up the changes, but it's consistent across applications - within openbox anyway)

[Tony0945]

Success! I emerged "lxappearance" running it created .icons/default/index.theme

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# This file is written by LXAppearance. Do not edit.
[Icon Theme]
Name=Default
Comment=Default Cursor Theme
Inherits=mate

But now what happens if I unmerge Mate?

[Anon-E-moose]

You didn't need lxappearance, it just creates a file, you could have done it by hand (I hand modified mine)

If the cursor package is part of the mate emerge, then it will disappear when you depclean mate.

If you like the cursor package, then copy it to your ~/.icons directory, not sure where it's located, but you should be able to find it (equery f mate would probably show where cursors get installed)

[Hu]

BTW xterm is black with white letters. Don't know how that aligns with #AAAAAA and #000000

000000 is black and AAAAAA are kind of gray

Specifically, AAAAAA is to use the color #AA for each of R, G, and B (in that order), which is why it is gray. Color #AA is 0xA0 + 0xA = 160 + 10 = 170, where #FF = 255 is the brightest value. So AAAAAA is a gray that is 170/255 as intense as the most white your display would produce. This may be useful if you want to pick a different intensity of gray, or if you want to bias the color off from a pure gray. For example, #AACCAA would increase the green from 170/255 to 204/255 intensity, while keeping the red and blue unchanged.

[Tony0945]

Success! I emerged "lxappearance" running it created .icons/default/index.theme

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# This file is written by LXAppearance. Do not edit.
[Icon Theme]
Name=Default
Comment=Default Cursor Theme
Inherits=mate

But now what happens if I unmerge Mate?

Answering my own question:

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tony@MSI ~ $ equery b /usr/share/icons/mate
 * Searching for /usr/share/icons/mate ... 
dev-libs/libmateweather-1.24.0-r1 (/usr/share/icons/mate)
x11-themes/mate-icon-theme-1.24.0 (/usr/share/icons/mate)
x11-themes/mate-themes-3.22.12 (/usr/share/icons/mate)

So I have to put the last two in the set "myopenbox"

[figueroa]

Emerge obconf. It IS in the portage tree.
Lxappearance is handy, small, and works well.
This is what I use with LXDE or just OpenBox for a nice white mouse cursor.

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$ cat .icons/default/index.theme
# This file is written by LXAppearance. Do not edit.
[Icon Theme]
Name=Default
Comment=Default Cursor Theme
Inherits=Neutral++_White

[Tony0945]

Thanks, Andy

This what I have now

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# This file is written by LXAppearance. Do not edit.
[Icon Theme]
Name=Default
Comment=Default Cursor Theme
Inherits=mate

LXAppearance also let me select a mate theme and now I have a white cursor on a desktop that looks just like Mate without the bloat.
Mate-panel is running but filling the log with dbus and polkit calls. Next step is to replace it with a custom panel based on wxwidgets instead of raw gtk.
I have v0.7 of an XP clone that has what I need ready to be extracted and recycled.

[Anon-E-moose]

I would use tint2 as a replacement for *panel, you can make it look like anything.
It uses gtk2, but only if the tint2conf use flag is set (I do recommend using tint2conf though)


Wxwidgets is not a bad choice either, polybar works well too (though the examples are a little sparse but it doesn't use gtk at all)

You could also use lxpanel (from lxde) uses gtk2 but no dbus.

[Tony0945]

Tried tint2 and lxpanel. Didn't like them. I have been working on wxQt and wxX11 but upstream isn't interested in patches. Told me something like "Those are demonstration projects, not for serious work.". They don't cover all widgets but do work for the basic widgets. I like not depending on a toolkit that keeps changing, so I prefer wxX11. I derived the ebuild from wxGTK with just a few configuration changes.
I did like pcmanfm. Thanks for recommending that. I looked at the code. "Oh, only a few C files!" Then a closer look. Big C files with weird function names. I like reusing my own code. I'm prejudiced that way.

[Anon-E-moose]

I used to use pcmanfm, but I've swapped over to spacefm (a fork from pcmanfm IIRC) with some nice features and still has desktop option.

As far as tint2, it requires a little playing with it to get it where you want it, but panels are a personal preference anyway.


This is a screenshot of my desktop https://i.postimg.cc/D02ch9Zb/screen.jpg

tint2 is at bottom, conky on right, polybar at top (the pic will disappear after a week)

[Tony0945]

Nice wallpaper! I'm going to try spacefm. One thing I don't like about pcmanfm is that if you check the preferences to not ask if it should launch in a terminal, it defaults to launching in a terminal so you choices are:
1. Ask every time you start a program.
2. Don't as, just launch in a terminal.
Missin is :
3. Don't ask, just launch without a terminal.
That's why I was looking at the code. So I could patch that.