understanding how to implement a better busy cursor policy

Configuration General Questions
1

My apologies if this isn’t 100% FVWM related, but my goal is to implement this in my FVWM environment.

In my .fvwm2rc I have a pretty standard function that changes the icon to a busy cursor when I click an icon or select a menu option that launches an application. This displays the busy icon when the cursor is over the root desktop, but when the cursor is then placed over another application the application cursor takes over. From what I understand this is how X11 apps are suppose to act, and FVWM has no power over what an application wants to do with a cursor.

My goal is to implement a busy cursor similar to what I had when I used KDE, namely, the cursor continues to represent a busy status, even when applications change the cursor shape. KDE did this by having a small animation on the cursor, regardless of the cursor shape.

Does anyone here know how such a thing might be accomplished under FVWM or native to Xorg? I’m assuming I would need to write a small program that calls some native X11 system calls, unless there is some feature of FVWM I have overlooked. One idea I had is to swap out the cursor theme on the fly, but my testing with xrdb didn’t yield positive results, and I seem to remember in the back on my head that swapping cursor themes inside X is not possible.

Any suggestions on where to start reading for more information?

2

You should have checked the freedesktop.org site.

standards.freedesktop.org/startu … latest.txt

As for what you’re looking for, there used to be a few standalone programs out there for startup notifications – I can’t remember their names. This was a few years ago now.

– Thomas Adam

3

Thanks Thomas… I will take a look at those links in depth. I’ve also started looking deeper into some of the Xlib functions. I was able to write a small program similar to xlsclients, but unfortunately some windows are excluded from my listing (as they are with xlsclients).