Cursor size in wayland/sway

jheidbrink · January 31, 2023, 9:12pm

I’m using wayland/sway and find that my cursor size changes when hovering over different windows. It is smaller on window borders than on most “regular” windows. It is tiny when hoving over a mpv window. Does somebody know the reason for this?

GrabbenD · February 19, 2023, 11:31am

Did you ever find a solution? It’s driving me crazy

jheidbrink · February 19, 2023, 4:39pm

No, unfortunately not

GrabbenD · February 20, 2023, 9:41am

I managed to find the culprit of my particular issue, I’m not sure if yours is the same:

github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland

Cursor changes size when moving

opened 12:01PM - 19 Feb 23 UTC

xRiot

bug

# Setup - I've configured GTK to use Bibata cursors theme. - No XWayland. - N…VIDIA GPU. # Issue When you move the cursor on the desktop or just inside of a application like Brave or VSCodium it shrinks and expands by about 2px. To clarify, you don't have to move it between applications to notice this as it's happening continuously. I'm having a hard time finding the culprit of this issue but some users suggests it's due to fractional scaling of bitmap icons? # Config I'm using NixOS and just using this option sets the cursor options globally without having to use `exec-once=hyprctl setcursor Bibata-Modern-Ice 22` or any other configuration: ``` home.pointerCursor = { gtk.enable = true; package = pkgs.bibata-cursors; name = "Bibata-Modern-Ice"; size = 22; }; ``` For reference, if you configure the cursor with a alternative approach you get the same result: <details> <summary>Example</summary> ``` # hyprland.conf exec-once=hyprctl setcursor Bibata-Modern-Ice 22 ``` With: ``` # .nix gtk = { enable = true; cursorTheme = { package = pkgs.bibata-cursors; name = "Bibata-Modern-Ice"; size = 22; }; }; ``` </details>

Other than that I’ve seen a lot of people recommend to set XCUSOR_SIZE=size env variable for XWayland/Flatpak apps to maintain consistency:

Also, using Home Manager allowed me to set the cursor theme for GDK globally (I haven’t tested any QT apps with this though). This way I don’t have to define the cursor theme in gtk.cursorTheme or my .config:

home.pointerCursor = {
  gtk.enable = true;
  package = pkgs.bibata-cursors;
  name = "Bibata-Modern-Ice";
  size = 22;
};

Hope this helps!
If you find any other workaround to your issue, make sure to update this thread so others can learn

jheidbrink · February 21, 2023, 9:54am

I think we have different issues - if I understood you right, your mouse cursor slightly changed size when moving, even within the same window. What I see is that the cursor size can be way different depending on the window it’s hovering.

Regarding my issue:

As far as I understand, in wayland every application is responsible for drawing the cursor hovering over its windows, so I would have to teach each application how to use the correct size.

I found various places indicating that some applications read the XCURSOR_SIZE environment variable and scale the cursor accordingly, but some quick experiments didn’t confirm this for mpv, alacritty and gedit.

greenm01 · October 22, 2023, 2:44am

Thanks for posting this. My mouse cursor would disappear whenever I opened Wezterm, but this brought it back… although I went with Vanilla-DMZ. Strangely enough, this cursor only works inside the window and then immediately switches back to GNOME’s default cursor outside of it.