November 15, 2012:

So, my X server has BUGS. Specifically, it tries to use hardware acceleration for things, and for reasons I haven't yet figured out, one of those things is the cursor - and the accelerated cursor will occasionally turn invisible. When it's invisible, it's still possible to *click*, and the server *thinks* it's drawing the cursor - but the cursor itself is gone.

And the cursor will not come back unless I reboot. (Not restart X. Reboot the entire computer.) And even if I do reboot, there's no guarantee it won't disappear again in a week or a day or an hour.

Trying to fix X bugs is a massive arsepain (especially when I don't know if the real bug is in Nouveau or the onboard GeForce 5100 that my Summer Computers have), and rebooting is aggravating. That being the case, clearly the easiest thing to do was to write my own cursor-displaying app (or, rather, an app that draws a picture of the cursor at the location the mouse pointer is at.).

There are a few minor visual warts, but overall it seems to work - even if I did have to blunder about in the Xlib APIs for a while to figure it out. Once I've used it for a couple of days (and possibly drawn a less-sucky cursor) I plan to release a proper version - feel free to poke me if it's after the 20th and it's not up for download.

 
   
   
 
   

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