Linux Desktop Hacks

Spice Up Your Desktop with Creative Mouse Cursors #23

Chapter 4, Related to X

|

75

HACK

Some distributions have the inconsiderate habit of placing

the cursor themes in the same directory as icon themes (dif-

ferent types of KDE or GNOME icons for your desktop). If

your Linux distribution does this, not all of the theme names

you find in the directory will be cursor themes. You’ll know

you’ve picked an icon theme by mistake if your desktop

starts up with the default mouse cursors rather than a new

cursor theme.

Set a Personal Default Theme

Each user can set his own default cursor theme by creating or modifying a file

called ~/.icons/default/index.theme (recall that the ~ represents your home

directory). This index.theme file is the one that tells your system which cursor

theme to use. Create the directories you need with the following command:

$ mkdir ~/.icons ~/.icons/default

Now use your favorite editor to create the index.theme file in the ~/.icons/

default directory. Place the following two lines in the file:

[Icon Theme]

Inherits=whiteglass

This example assumes you have a cursor theme called Whiteglass installed on

your system (the earlier example showed that it exists on my system, because

the directory name whiteglass appears in the /usr/share/cursors/xorg-x11 direc-

tory that contains all the globally available cursor themes). Obviously, if you

don’t have the Whiteglass theme on your system, this ...