On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 04:06:53PM -0400, Andres Salomon wrote:
Well, because you can set it elsewhere, and some people may want to use another cursor. The natural way to do so is to configure your X startup scripts, because it's WM independent.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Are people really setting cursors via xsetroot, and feel strongly about it? Is setting a string in your .xinitrc really what people consider "the natural way" to configure pointers (versus a GUI app like gnome-appearance-properties)?
If i need a GUI to configure my GUI, something is seriously broken. Heck, do people using xmonad (or ratpoison, or scrotwm, or whatever tiling and keyboard-driven window manager) really care about the mouse cursor at all? Or do they fear editing some stupid ~/.xinitrc or ~/.xsession?
Why add code to xmonad when it's not necessary?
Because it provides a default.
X11 provides a default (the ugly cross shaped cursor). Overriding this in your ~/.xsession and/or ~/.xinitrc is a way to get a fancier cursor regardless of whatever window manager you're using. If your favor display manager sets another default cursor, blame your display manager.
It's not a large amount of code at all, and it's pretty clear what it's doing. Why make the unnecessary call out to xsetroot at X start time when it can easily be handled within XMonad via 4 lines of code?
It's adding code to xmonad that doesn't belong there.
Personally, I'm sometimes playing with and comparing different WMs (stuff like xmonad, scrotwm, ratpoison), and I'm *used* to get the cursor I like without tweaking the WM configuration first.
That's fine, but I could also point out window managers that override the cursor (ion3 and metacity, for example). You're not guaranteed that the window manager won't override the default cursor.
Then ion3 and metacity are doing it wrong. Ciao, Kili