>>>>> On 2019-04-10, Ivan Shmakov wrote:
>>>>> Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> writes:
>>>>> In comp.windows.x, Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.net> wrote:

>>> Barring that, is there a clean way to disable Xcursor? So far,
>>> about the only workaround I've found is to point the XCURSOR_PATH
>>> environment variable to a non-existent directory, e. g., in my
>>> ~/.xsession.

(Still haven't figured it out. On my own Debian installs, the
workaround below seems to work.)

>> Use a different window manager? I use icewm and have pure old-school
>> cursors.

> That's interesting; my guess was that new-style cursors were
> requested by the applications explicitly -- as suggested by the
> fact that, say, $ XCURSOR_PATH=/nowhere xedit & resulted in an
> Xedit starting unaffected by them. But it seems to be more
> complicated than that, as some programs do not appear to be linked
> against libXcursor, yet still show decidedly non-classic cursors.

> Conversely, Firefox employs such cursor regardless of how (or if)
> the WM treats them.

> Then again, libX11 isn't /linked/ against libXcursor -- but it
> references the latter by name, per $ strings output.

> (Now, also seeing all the *-theme dependencies in Debian, I'm
> eager to try adding "path-exclude /usr/share/icons/*" to dpkg.cfg
> and see if anything breaks.)

It does; in particular, /usr/share/icons/Adwaita/16x16/actions/
has icons used by common toolkit dialogs and whatnot, and while
some programs might be happy to show user an empty icon if one
cannot be loaded from there, others just crash in such a case.

Still, I've been using path-exclude=/usr/share/icons/*/cursor/*
for years now without any apparent ill effects. Alongside the
following, just to conserve some blocks and inodes.

path-exclude=/usr/share/icons/*/???x???/*
path-exclude=/usr/share/icons/*/scalable/*

--
FSF associate member #7257 http://am-1.org/~ivan/