djb@cbnews.ATT.COM (David J. Bryant) (10/25/88)
I've been meaning to bring this up, but forgot until the recent discussion of xterm manuals.. I found the xterm cursor ugly and hard to spot, so I figured I'd change it. No problem -- the manual page said it understood the pointerShape resource, so I leafed through my cursor catalog (from a SIGGRAPH '88 course), found one I liked, and put an entry in .Xdefaults. Nope, xterm seemed to ignore it. So I tried something else. Still no luck. Then I began to doubt my ability to write a .Xdefaults entry (I'm only a recent convert to X) and so tried various permutations there, all to no avail. As a last resort I decided to examine the xterm code. (Silly me -- why didn't I think of that first...) Anyhow, imagine my surprise when I discovered that xterm apparently only understands one alternative pointerShape, that being "arrow". Any other specification is ignored in favor of "xterm". Ugh. Well, I tried "arrow" and it did work, but it's no "gumby". Sure wish the man page had said: "...pointerShape (class Cursor) Specifies the name of the shape of the pointer. The default is "xterm". Anything else other than "arrow" will be taken to mean "xterm"..." So if someone is going to write/re-write/edit xterm documents, please note this change. (For fun, you can delve into xterm's arcane innards and teach it to understand arbitrary cursor selection -- that's what I did and I'm quite pleased to have "gumby" and "fleur" available as cursors.) (For extra credit, tweak 'xfed' so it can edit cursor.bdf. Another educational opportunity I highly recommend, and entertaining, plus for some reason I had to fix my sailboat cursor as it was missing its hull...) David Bryant (djb@cbosgd.att.com) AT&T Bell Laboratories Columbus, Ohio 43123 614/860-4516