Finding the cursor

[Peter Hutterer]

On Fri, Oct 09, 2015 at 10:33:23PM -0400, Alan Corey wrote:
> I don't think I posted this before.
> 
> The cursor changes depending what it's over, and if you've got
> something like an 1920x1080 screen full of mostly rxvt windows then
> most of the time it's an I-beam.  That can be hard to spot if you've
> looked away or been away.  MS Windows, XP at least, has an option to
> go to a big cursor if you do something like hold down a ctrl key by
> itself for more than 2 seconds.  The activating keystroke could be
> different but is there an easy way to do that with X?  Something so
> the application-specified cursor gets overridden temporarily and you
> get a cursor that jumps out at you?  Big, animated, flashing,
> something that doesn't blend into the desktop?  Then back to normal
> once you let go of that key.

this isn't something X itself does, it's something the desktop
environment/WM needs to take care of. GNOME has the locate pointer feature
which seems to be accessible through gnome-tweak-tool only [1] and that'll
highlight the cursor when you hit Ctrl.
Since you're using something else, that WM needs to provide a similar
feature but either way, it's not what the X server itself would provide.

Alternatively, 

Cheers,
   Peter

[1] gsettings get org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.mouse locate-pointer



> 
> I spend about 99% of my time in X these days, there isn't much I'd
> change.  Window manager of choice is rxvt, OS is OpenBSD.
> 
>   Alan
>