On Oct 26, 2007, at 12:50 , Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
the problem: some apps, a blank workspace and the border around windows all show the default "X" mouse cursor. This shows up in a variety of apps: gnucash, xpdf, xvidtune*, Xdialog**. There are probably others, but I haven't gone through the whole list. Other apps work just fine: urxvt and other terminals show the usual text-insertion cursor. firefox/iceweasel show an arrow or insertion cursor as expected and so forth.
X11 windows (the low-level window object, as opposed to what most people (and window managers) consider a window; many (but not all) of the visible widgets in a GUI application are independent windows) can have a cursor associated with them, or otherwise inherit the one set on the parent window. Thus, most applications will not set a cursor at all, or only do so on special widgets (e.g. Xaw scrollbars get the bidirectional arrow cursor). Problem is, the default X11 root window cursor is a big ugly X, not a pointer like most people (and applications!) expect. Integrated desktop systems install a default pointer cursor, but simple window managers (not just xmonad but also things like twm) don't. As noted, this is easy to fix with xsetroot, but it remains an unfortunate default. (Hm. Someone should petition x.org to change the default root cursor....) -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH