XOR support for mouse cursors

[Ben Swartzlander]

Are you talking about patent 4,197,590? That one appears to have been 
issued in 1980. It must have expired 10 years ago!

-Ben Swartzlander



Marco wrote:
> Ben Swartzlander escreveu:
>> As far as I can tell, X does not support mouse cursors that invert 
>> the pixels underneath them (like Windows mouse cursors). This causes 
>> a number of problems. First, it makes it impossible to use a 1-pixel 
>> wide "I" style cursor for text editing, because the cursor will 
>> completely disappear over a black background (or a white background, 
>> if you use a white cursor). The only usable "I" style cursors I've 
>> seen are 3 pixels wide, such as a black "I" with a white outline to 
>> prevent it from vanishing. This would not be so bad, but then certain 
>> applications like rdesktop (and possibly Wine) need to use actual 
>> Windows cursors, so they convert the Windows cursors bitmap to a 
>> valid X cursor by discarding most of the data, which in the case of 
>> the 1-pixel wide "I" cursor is mostly useless.
>>
>> A apologize if this issue has been discussed before but I want to 
>> know (1) if there are any extensions or options I can use to fix this 
>> behavior (2) if not, is there a good reason why X has this limitation 
>> and (3) what can I do to fix this? I am a long time Windows and Linux 
>> use and as much as I would like to replace my Windows desktop with 
>> Linux, the poor mouse cursor support is one issue holding me back. 
>> I'm willing to code an extension to X if that's what it takes (and 
>> obviously write the patch for rdesktop) but I'd like to know how 
>> others have dealt with this problem and if anyone has some suggestions.
>>
>> thanks,
>> -Ben Swartzlander
>>
> Because It is patented?
>
> <http://www.google.com/search?q=XOR+cursor+patent&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.debian:pt-BR:unofficial&client=iceweasel-a> 
>