Re: How to get rid of the mouse pointer ?

* Matthew Allum <breakfast_at_10.am> [Sat, 19 Apr 2003]:
> on Fri, Apr 18, 2003 at 04:54:54PM +0200, Tomas Styblo wrote:
> > I see no reason to display a mouse pointer on a device
> > controlled by touch-screen and stylus. It's annoying and gets
> > in the way. No other GUI for touch-screen based devices
> > displays it (Opie,WinCE..).
> >
> > Matchbox and xkbd manage to hide it, but other GPE apps do
> > not.

[SNIP]

> With X 4.3 we now how themeable alpha blended XCursors. A simple
> solution to this problem maybe to simple create a completely
> transparent cursor theme and set this as the theme when no
> cursors are wanted. Because of the way new XCursors are
> implemented, this should just *work* with all apps.
>
> All it needs is someone to create a completely transparent
> theme.

I created such a theme. It's available here:

http://sweb.cz/tripie/ipaq/libxcursor-theme-transparent_1.0_all.ipk

After installation it may be activated by this command:

ln -s /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/icons/transparent ~/.icons/default

I don't know whether and how you plan to integrate it into GPE.
I think it would be a great idea to remove the code that hides the
mouse pointer from matchbox/GPE and use the transparent theme
instead. This way the user has a chance to use a normal theme
in case when the mouse pointer is wanted, ie. when x2x is used.

> However currently, to change the theme on the fly may require a
> login/logout - I not 100% sure about this.

There is a function XcursorSetTheme mentioned in the Xcursor
man-page. I don't know how it's supposed to work; I tried to use it
in a simple test program and the cursor theme did not change,
neither was any error generated. But I personally have no problem
with this, I don't mind re-logging.

-- 
Tomas Styblo <tripie_at_cpan.org>
PGP: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xC97EA4B6