X cursor theme

Posted on February 4, 2016 with tags . See the previous or next posts.

There’s not much to talk about X cursor themes, except when they change behind your back :)

A while back, after a firefox upgrade, it—and only it—showed a different cursor theme: basically double the size, and (IMHO) uglier. Searched for a while, but couldn’t figure what makes firefox special, except that it is a GTK application.

After another round of dist-upgrades, now everything except xterms were showing the big cursors. This annoyed me to no end—as I don’t use a high-DPI display, the new cursors are just too damn big. Only to find out two things:

  • thankfully, under Debian, the x-cursor-theme is an alternatives entry, so it can be easily configured
  • sadly, the adwaita-icon-theme package (whose description says “default icon theme of GNOME”) installs itself as a very high priority alternatives entry (90), which means it takes over my default X cursor

Sigh, Gnome.