X Window System User's Guide, Vol 3 (The Definitive Guides to the X Window System)

D

Standard Cursors

This appendix shows the standard cursor images that can be used by X programs.

D

Standard Cursors

Table D-1 lists the cursors available in the standard distribution of X from MIT; the cursor shapes themselves are pictured in Figure D-1.

To specify a cursor as an argument to a command line option, as the value of a resource variable, etc., strip the XC_ prefix from the symbol name. For example, to specify the XC_sailboat cursor as the xterm pointer, you could enter the command:

% xterm -xrm ‘xterm*pointerShape: sailboat’

Each cursor has an associated numeric value (to the right of the symbol name in the table). You may notice that the values skip the odd numbers. Each cursor is actually composed of two font characters: the character that defines the shape (pictured in Figure D-1), and a mask character (not shown) that sets the cursor shape off from the root (or other) window. (More precisely, the mask selects which pixels in the screen around the cursor are disturbed by the cursor.) The mask is generally the same shape as the character it underlies but is one pixel wider in all directions.

To get an idea of what masks look like, display the entire cursor font using the command:

% xfd -fn cursor

The mwm window manager uses several of the standard cursor symbols. In addition, mwm uses some Motif-specific cursors, which are illustrated in Figure 1-3 in Part One of this guide.

Table D-1. Standard Cursor Symbols

Figure D-1. The Standard Cursors