Description: Red dot cursor is just that: a cursor theme with red dots
Now designed to work with the upcoming KDE 3.2!
The sources and some docs are included in the package so you can use it to create your own theme.
======================== Thanks to fredrikh who has provided the necessary information to complete this set for KDE.Last changelog:
15/10/2003: * The upcoming KDE 3.2 includes a new easy install system for cursors.
The file was modified accordingly to follow this new standard. Just go to kcontrol->Peripherals->Mouse->Cursor Theme->Install New Theme... and select the file you just downloaded.
Just that simple!
14/03/2003: * Changed install directory to ~/.icons/reddot. Now it's much cleaner
First you have to copy as root the "RedDot" folder in
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/icons/.
Then edit the file
/etc/sysconfig/windowmanager
in the line
X_MOUSE_CURSOR="..."
to
X_MOUSE_CURSOR="RedDot".
Now log out and log in as your default user, that's all.
Great theme. I was wondering though if it could be possible to include a version without the shadows.
I know shadows might be aesthetically appealing, but for people with less than perfect vision, it causes additional eye strain.
Thanks for your theme :)
Let me first say that I really like
the red dot cursor theme.
It's my standard theme.
But there's one thing I find irritating:
The fact that the text cursor (the one
shaped like this: ][ ) is
animated. When I type a text
(e.g. in kmail) the mouse cursor is not
in the centre of my vision. Then the
animation goes off (the little red dot
moving from left to right). I find this very
distracting. Human perception is very
sensitive to motion. I think it's perfectkly
ok to have animation when the cursor
is the focus of attention anyway (e.g.
when it indicates that the app is busy
or when you're resizing a window).
But when it's not I think it should be
static.
What do you think? Would it be possible
to provide a version with a static text
cursor? I'd be the first to install it. ;-)
Cheers,
cmbofh.
Mmmm... not sure, I know what you mean... but some people seem to like it.
Why don't you remove the dot? Just open the svg icon, open in sodipodi, click on the dot, and remove it,... it's very easy to change the icons.
I must thank you for this doc...
very useful :)
The structure of your cursor package is wonderful (with makefile and sources... that's great, man :) )...
thank you!
this is probably the best cursor theme so far for X11....and it was working great for me, until recently. i dunno if running galeon did it or not, but suddenly the symlinks for mozilla are not working. i've reinstalled the cursor set, but no luck. could someone w/ a working default reddot cursor set upload or send me just the theme w/out the sources??
It seems to work here for mozilla, but I can't test galeon, since I have almost nothing installed from gnome, but for the few apps that I have installed it seems to work.
What you can actually do is, open a terminal, and type:
export XCURSOR_DISCOVER=true
Then in the same terminal, run galeon. It will (should) show all the numbers (hashes) that are being used for the cursors. You'll see the cursor, and a number. You only need to symlink that number to the correct cursor.
doh! i'm kickin' myself for not seeing this earlier. you may be interested in knowing the mistake i made. the cursors are installed in $HOME/.icons/ but after a while, i moved the cursor folder to /usr/share/icons/ and changed systemwide default index.theme to inherit reddot. the problem, is that moving the cursor folder breaks the symlinks which point specifically to the folder the theme is installed to originally. could the installation be changed to avoid this? i would think so, because it doesn't happen w/ other cursor sets i've installed (except yellowdot).
anyway, thanks for the great cursors. :)
That's probably because the symlinks have an absolute (not relative) path. I'll have a look at it. Anyway, I wouldn't like to update the package just for that. I don't want to force people to download anything when there're no actual changes...
...improving the directory structure!
...taking my proposal for a name of the cursors, I feel honored ;)
...YOUR GREAT WORK! Looks like now (as the left_ptr_warch works in Mozilla, which is even animated!!!) the cursor theme is perfect.
Bye.
Thorsten
First off, great cursor theme! I'm planning on making some different colour versions of this, and I'll post them as soon as I've finished!
Now I've found some missing cursors. First off is the kill cursor, which is completely missing from the set! Next, the symlinks for Qt/KDE seem to be messed up, because the wrong cursors are shown when resizing windows by their sides/top/bottom. In Gtk apps I get the left_side, right_side etc. cursors, but in Qt/KDE I get the h_doublearrow and v_doublearrow. That might be deliberate, but you really should keeps things standard, as it's confusing having different cursors between widget sets!
>First off, great cursor theme! I'm planning on >making some different colour versions of this, >and I'll post them as soon as I've finished!
Thanks, I'll be waiting for your version to try it. Mmmm... I'm now thinking that I should relicense it properly as GPL :-)
> Now I've found some missing cursors. First off > is the kill cursor, which is completely missing
The kill cursor is there. It's called "draped_box" which is the standard cursor. (type xkill, you'll get it). Oh I see, I think you refer to pirate... mmmmm... trouble. I was never able to draw a proper skull ;-) I'll think of it for the weekend.
> from the set! Next, the symlinks for Qt/KDE
> seem to be messed up, because the wrong >cursors are shown when resizing windows
The symlinks are correct, but Qt uses a nonstandard cursor set. They use the same cursor for opposing sides, so they must be symmetric, and one cannot use the standard ones, otherwise they look wrong. (This is what happenned in the early versions of this set).
The same thing happens for the diagonals: opposite diagonals must have the same cursor for QT apps, which is why I have fd_double_arrow & bd_double_arrow.
There's no much to do about it right now.
Do you think it would be more reasonable to have v_double_arrow and h_double_arrow as arrows pointing out (not in)? I've thought of that, but not too sure about the most proper solution.
I forgot to mention that all the apps actually use v_double_arrow and h_double_arrow, as far as you run them under kde, since all use kwin as window manager, so there's consistency between the widget sets.
Under Gnome though, they'll use the standard set (left, right, top, bottom, top-left...)
Yers, I noticed that after I had a closer look - it is GNOME vs KDE, not just Gtk vs Qt ;)
I should release the yellow versions either this evening or tomorrow :) It's not too hard just opening the SVGs and changing the colours, and I changed the Makefile so it'll install properly :)
That's a shame about Qt cursors. I suppose arrows facing in is most intuitive, because the normal resizing ones (in GNOME) face in as well. Nevermind.
As for kill... why do I not get the reddot kill cursor? I still get the X skull and cruss bones! And I might alter that one - I like my skulls ;)
> I should release the yellow versions either
> this evening or tomorrow :) It's not too hard
> just opening the SVGs and changing the
> colours, and I changed the Makefile so it'll
> install properly :)
The worst part are the animations. In order to save space I don't keep the svg's for every position, so you'll need to recreate those png's and of course, add the shadows one by one in gimp.
I look forward to see that Makefile... :-)
Yes, at first I just redid the red (now yellow) dots in the animated pictures, but then on some cursors I also wanted to redo the look of the arrow/circle, so I've been moving the little dot around in Sodipodi, then exporting to a PNG. It doesn't take too long once I get into it :)
What must be possible, and would be very cool, would be to make a script that automatically creates all of the PNGs from a single SVG, and can modify colours/fill styles. SVGs are smply XML files, so you could in theory do it, though it's more work than I can be bothered with. It would let you just regenerate your cursors in any colour combination though :D
It's not that simple. SVG is a format that is easy to change, and I think sodipodi allows exporting to png from command line. But the difficult part is adding the shadow automatically, which I don't think it's possible in SVG.
If you modify the cursors don't forget to change the hot-spot point in the config files also.
make install does't work for me.
i do the cursors generation by hand
>cd sources
>for file in *; do if [ -d $file ]; then xcursorgen $file/${file}.conf ../cursors/${file}; fi; done
>for file in *.conf; do xcursorgen ${file} ../cursors/${file%%.conf}; done
>cd ..
>make install
that's all
I know about this problem. The Makefile uses the function $(eval ...) , which I thought it was an old feature, but was implemented only recently. One needs to upgrade to version 3.80 to support it.
The advantage to use Makefiles is that it needs to regenerate only those cursors that were changed, not the whole set. And $(eval ) is a great function to have a dynamic Makefile that is automatically updated everytime one adds cursors to the set.
I was thinking to include something similar to what you mentioned in the makefile for those using Makefile v.<3.80, but I don't know how to test the Makefile version inside it. Any hints?
Ratings & Comments
111 Comments
anybody got the default cursor and bussy cursor to work with suse 9.0?
Same here. With 9.0 the arrow doesn't work... :((((( I think we must rename the arrows, but I don't know how to call them. Bye!
First you have to copy as root the "RedDot" folder in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/icons/. Then edit the file /etc/sysconfig/windowmanager in the line X_MOUSE_CURSOR="..." to X_MOUSE_CURSOR="RedDot". Now log out and log in as your default user, that's all.
Many thanks!! For a system wide, it works!!! :)!! Is it possible to have a single user installation for the theme? Thanks!!
Sorry! I only found this way to set a x11 mouse theme globally as default. On SuSE 9.0 the installation in "~/.kde/icons" doesn't work correctly.
...put a Xkill icon,something like crystal icon set! Thanx for your work!
Great theme. I was wondering though if it could be possible to include a version without the shadows. I know shadows might be aesthetically appealing, but for people with less than perfect vision, it causes additional eye strain. Thanks for your theme :)
Let me first say that I really like the red dot cursor theme. It's my standard theme. But there's one thing I find irritating: The fact that the text cursor (the one shaped like this: ][ ) is animated. When I type a text (e.g. in kmail) the mouse cursor is not in the centre of my vision. Then the animation goes off (the little red dot moving from left to right). I find this very distracting. Human perception is very sensitive to motion. I think it's perfectkly ok to have animation when the cursor is the focus of attention anyway (e.g. when it indicates that the app is busy or when you're resizing a window). But when it's not I think it should be static. What do you think? Would it be possible to provide a version with a static text cursor? I'd be the first to install it. ;-) Cheers, cmbofh.
Mmmm... not sure, I know what you mean... but some people seem to like it. Why don't you remove the dot? Just open the svg icon, open in sodipodi, click on the dot, and remove it,... it's very easy to change the icons.
I must thank you for this doc... very useful :) The structure of your cursor package is wonderful (with makefile and sources... that's great, man :) )... thank you!
this is probably the best cursor theme so far for X11....and it was working great for me, until recently. i dunno if running galeon did it or not, but suddenly the symlinks for mozilla are not working. i've reinstalled the cursor set, but no luck. could someone w/ a working default reddot cursor set upload or send me just the theme w/out the sources??
It seems to work here for mozilla, but I can't test galeon, since I have almost nothing installed from gnome, but for the few apps that I have installed it seems to work. What you can actually do is, open a terminal, and type: export XCURSOR_DISCOVER=true Then in the same terminal, run galeon. It will (should) show all the numbers (hashes) that are being used for the cursors. You'll see the cursor, and a number. You only need to symlink that number to the correct cursor.
doh! i'm kickin' myself for not seeing this earlier. you may be interested in knowing the mistake i made. the cursors are installed in $HOME/.icons/ but after a while, i moved the cursor folder to /usr/share/icons/ and changed systemwide default index.theme to inherit reddot. the problem, is that moving the cursor folder breaks the symlinks which point specifically to the folder the theme is installed to originally. could the installation be changed to avoid this? i would think so, because it doesn't happen w/ other cursor sets i've installed (except yellowdot). anyway, thanks for the great cursors. :)
That's probably because the symlinks have an absolute (not relative) path. I'll have a look at it. Anyway, I wouldn't like to update the package just for that. I don't want to force people to download anything when there're no actual changes...
...improving the directory structure! ...taking my proposal for a name of the cursors, I feel honored ;) ...YOUR GREAT WORK! Looks like now (as the left_ptr_warch works in Mozilla, which is even animated!!!) the cursor theme is perfect. Bye. Thorsten
First off, great cursor theme! I'm planning on making some different colour versions of this, and I'll post them as soon as I've finished! Now I've found some missing cursors. First off is the kill cursor, which is completely missing from the set! Next, the symlinks for Qt/KDE seem to be messed up, because the wrong cursors are shown when resizing windows by their sides/top/bottom. In Gtk apps I get the left_side, right_side etc. cursors, but in Qt/KDE I get the h_doublearrow and v_doublearrow. That might be deliberate, but you really should keeps things standard, as it's confusing having different cursors between widget sets!
>First off, great cursor theme! I'm planning on >making some different colour versions of this, >and I'll post them as soon as I've finished! Thanks, I'll be waiting for your version to try it. Mmmm... I'm now thinking that I should relicense it properly as GPL :-) > Now I've found some missing cursors. First off > is the kill cursor, which is completely missing The kill cursor is there. It's called "draped_box" which is the standard cursor. (type xkill, you'll get it). Oh I see, I think you refer to pirate... mmmmm... trouble. I was never able to draw a proper skull ;-) I'll think of it for the weekend. > from the set! Next, the symlinks for Qt/KDE > seem to be messed up, because the wrong >cursors are shown when resizing windows The symlinks are correct, but Qt uses a nonstandard cursor set. They use the same cursor for opposing sides, so they must be symmetric, and one cannot use the standard ones, otherwise they look wrong. (This is what happenned in the early versions of this set). The same thing happens for the diagonals: opposite diagonals must have the same cursor for QT apps, which is why I have fd_double_arrow & bd_double_arrow. There's no much to do about it right now. Do you think it would be more reasonable to have v_double_arrow and h_double_arrow as arrows pointing out (not in)? I've thought of that, but not too sure about the most proper solution.
I forgot to mention that all the apps actually use v_double_arrow and h_double_arrow, as far as you run them under kde, since all use kwin as window manager, so there's consistency between the widget sets. Under Gnome though, they'll use the standard set (left, right, top, bottom, top-left...)
Yers, I noticed that after I had a closer look - it is GNOME vs KDE, not just Gtk vs Qt ;) I should release the yellow versions either this evening or tomorrow :) It's not too hard just opening the SVGs and changing the colours, and I changed the Makefile so it'll install properly :) That's a shame about Qt cursors. I suppose arrows facing in is most intuitive, because the normal resizing ones (in GNOME) face in as well. Nevermind. As for kill... why do I not get the reddot kill cursor? I still get the X skull and cruss bones! And I might alter that one - I like my skulls ;)
> I should release the yellow versions either > this evening or tomorrow :) It's not too hard > just opening the SVGs and changing the > colours, and I changed the Makefile so it'll > install properly :) The worst part are the animations. In order to save space I don't keep the svg's for every position, so you'll need to recreate those png's and of course, add the shadows one by one in gimp. I look forward to see that Makefile... :-)
Yes, at first I just redid the red (now yellow) dots in the animated pictures, but then on some cursors I also wanted to redo the look of the arrow/circle, so I've been moving the little dot around in Sodipodi, then exporting to a PNG. It doesn't take too long once I get into it :) What must be possible, and would be very cool, would be to make a script that automatically creates all of the PNGs from a single SVG, and can modify colours/fill styles. SVGs are smply XML files, so you could in theory do it, though it's more work than I can be bothered with. It would let you just regenerate your cursors in any colour combination though :D
It's not that simple. SVG is a format that is easy to change, and I think sodipodi allows exporting to png from command line. But the difficult part is adding the shadow automatically, which I don't think it's possible in SVG. If you modify the cursors don't forget to change the hot-spot point in the config files also.
make install does't work for me. i do the cursors generation by hand >cd sources >for file in *; do if [ -d $file ]; then xcursorgen $file/${file}.conf ../cursors/${file}; fi; done >for file in *.conf; do xcursorgen ${file} ../cursors/${file%%.conf}; done >cd .. >make install that's all
I know about this problem. The Makefile uses the function $(eval ...) , which I thought it was an old feature, but was implemented only recently. One needs to upgrade to version 3.80 to support it. The advantage to use Makefiles is that it needs to regenerate only those cursors that were changed, not the whole set. And $(eval ) is a great function to have a dynamic Makefile that is automatically updated everytime one adds cursors to the set. I was thinking to include something similar to what you mentioned in the makefile for those using Makefile v.<3.80, but I don't know how to test the Makefile version inside it. Any hints?
Could you please update this theme and recategorize it under "X11 Mouse Themes"? That would really be appreciated.