[xmonad] Left pointer gone, again

[Wirt Wolff]

Excerpts from Magnus Therning's message of Tue Apr 20 11:22:51 -0600 2010:
> Once again my normally beautiful left pointer has been replaced by the ugly
> standard X left pointer.  As has been the case in the past[1] it's only in
> some places that it happens.  This time it doesn't seem to work to set the
> pointer using xsetroot though.
> 
> Any suggestions on what could be the issue here?

Just guessing here, but since no other responses I'll open myself to
possible embarassment guessing: if you were setting the cursor through
xmonad as described below and upgraded your haskell X11, maybe the
cursorfont headers weren't available at /usr/include/X11/cursorfont.h

Otherwise if you'd been using regular X login methods...

I've a vague recollection that SLIM login manager does something unusual
with the mouse pointer, so if you use it that could be worth investigating.
Other than that, it may or may not be worth actually tracking down the cause.
X configuration, and distro variations on the proper way to for users to
customize their X have changed more frequently than most sane people can
track these past few years. :-)

The reason it's at default some places and not others is that applications
are allowed to set their own cursors, but not all do, so it falls back to
the one set on the root window.

> How do I get rid of the ugly X left pointer?

One easy way: with xmonad-contrib-0.9 or greater the desktop config
startup hooks set this cursor to some commonly used left pointer one.
Or you can use setDefaultCursor from XMonad.Util.Cursor in your
startupHook to set one of your choice from Graphics.X11.Xlib.Cursor.

> 
> [1] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/xmonad/2008-March/004984.html
-- 
wmw