(I guess the problem is grounded in history: originally cursors did not have a semantic meaning at all. Where are the semantics of the X11-cursors defined? Should a circle cursor be just a circle (and the semantics come from the application so there's really not much freedom for a cursor theme designer)? Or is it just a short-hand for 'do not enter' (and the cursor fonts are free to express them at their will)? The toolkit engine (Tcl/Tk), because they suggest a cursor with some (or no) meaning, but pass it on to a renderer that uses a different (or some) meaning?.The cursor theme, assigning an arbitrary (but specific) meaning to an icon that is not defined semantically.The application using the circle cursor, assuming the wrong semantics?.So my question is: Who is at the fault here? AFAICT at least on Windows, the circle cursor is provided by Tk itself (rather than relying on a system cursor). On macOS and Windows this is not a problem. This ' not allowed' cursor is irritating our users, as it is used to indicate a positive ' now you can do something'. Unfortunately, it seems that there is some rough consensus between various icon themes available in Linux Distributions, that the circle cursor has a semantic meaning that goes beyond a simple 'circle', but instead should have a negative connotation of 'not possible' or 'forbidden', and displays as something associated with 🚫: TclTk will indeed render the circle cursor as a circle on macOS, Windows and (sometimes) Linux. If you hover the mouse over a node, the cursor changes (indicating that you can create a connection):Īt some point in the past, we decided that from all the available cursors, the circle cursor (as provided by TclTk) is the best match for our requirement.Īccording to, the circle cursor looks like, well, a circle on X11. The software is a graph editor written in Tcl/Tk, where you can connect nodes with your mouse. That is: we are not happy with the way how some cursors are displayed if certain icon themes are installed.

In a GUI application I co-develop, we have a bit of trouble with using cursors.

Windows 10 themes with cursor and icon