Cursor invisible in GTK apps

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1

I use the Vanilla-DMZ cursor theme, as described in the wiki (Cursor Themes - NixOS Wiki). This seems to work fine for most applications, although I see different cursor EXWM/emacs as opposed to other applications (e.g. qutebrowser, urxvt).

However, for GTK applications (e.g. inkscape, nm-connection-editor), there is a transparent large X as cursor, indicating that GTK applications don’t make use of the Vanilla-DMZ cursor theme…
I’ve edited /home/moritz/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini to contain

gtk-cursor-theme-name=Vanilla-DMZ

instead of breeze_cursors (although ‘locate breeze_cursors’ shows some occurrences in my /nix/store), but still this does not fix the problem. I have

Xcursor.theme: Vanilla-DMZ

set in .Xresources, otherwise no cursor-related settings.

Thanks in advance and please let me know if further information might be helpful

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2

What desktop environment do you use, in some environment GTK uses the config file while in others it relies on XSettings or something else.

What does gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-theme print? You might need to run it with something like the following:

nix-shell -I "nixpkgs=channel:nixos-unstable" -p glib gsettings-desktop-schemas --run 'XDG_DATA_DIRS=$GSETTINGS_SCHEMAS_PATH gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-theme'
3

Thank you for your response! I use EXWM. I get Adwaita with your command.

[I] moritz@mopad ~ [1]> gsettings get  org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-theme
No schemas installed
[I] moritz@mopad ~ [1]> XDG_DATA_DIRS=$GSETTINGS_SCHEMAS_PATH gsettings get  org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-theme
No schemas installed
nix-shell -I "nixpkgs=channel:nixos-unstable" -p glib gsettings-desktop-schemas --run 'XDG_DATA_DIRS=$GSETTINGS_SCHEMAS_PATH gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-theme'
'Adwaita'
4

Then try the set subcommand to set it to whatever you want.

5

I am able to set it to “Vanilla-DMZ”, but the cursor still remains a full-white X (I assume it means that the cursor cannot be found). I would be fine with Adwaita, but it neither finds that one.

6

Solution: Missing some cursor icons - #4 by garret

xsetroot -cursor_name left_ptr

7

I am using the same setting, but I find the left_ptr in GTK applications looks different (worse) than it does in QT applications. Do you find the same thing? Am I doing something wrong?

8

I personally don’t care about the style so much at this moment. If you find a solution, please share though! :slight_smile:

9

I decided to look into this a bit. I found a list of available X Font Cursors:
https://tronche.com/gui/x/xlib/appendix/b/

On my system, left_ptr doesn’t look great. Not sure how these cursors are rendered, and how resolution/scaling, etc. affects them. I prefer the way top_left_arrow looks.

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