On Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:07:19 +0200
Matthias Kilian
On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 02:55:20PM -0400, Andres Salomon wrote:
You can always set the cursor from your .xsession or .xinitrc using xsetroot(1) before starting xmonad (or any other window manager).
Yep, and some display managers also set it. However, my opinion is that xmonad should be setting it. If people feel differently, I'd like to hear why.
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)? I should point out that in a lot of instances, it's not even clear where such a thing would be set. For example, while 'startx' on my debian system allows me to run xsetroot via ~/.xinitrc, 'nodm' completely ignores .xinitrc (making cursor override documentation such as the stuff at http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xmonad pretty useless). If your argument is that the cursor should be allowed to be overridden, I believe you. In the case of the desktop environment, it can override the cursor as it normally does. In the case of no desktop environment, where you might want to override the cursor, I would think that being able to do so via xmonad would be a _lot_ more useful versus having to figure out which particular X init script you should be modifying or creating. I can certainly change the code to allow users to override the cursor via ~/.xmonad/xmonad.hs, for example.
Why add code to xmonad when it's not necessary?
Because it provides a default. 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?
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.