SUMMARY As far as I can tell, Plasma doesn't provide a simple way to change the cursor color. Other OS's like macOS and Windows have the option to change the color of the systems cursor, which can be great accessibility benefit. You can obviously change the cursor theme, but I would hope to be able to change the fill and outline color of the current cursor theme or more realistically just the Breeze themed cursor. As know multiple people who use this feature on Windows, so I would imagine it would also be appreciated in Plasma. RELEVANT ART macOS: https://static1.makeuseofimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/pointer-customization-features-macos-monterey.png Windows 11: https://149584678.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Settings-Accessibility-Mouse-pointer-and-touch-Mouse-pointer-style.png ChromeOS:https://www.androidpolice.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/12/Cursor_colors.png SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Windows: macOS: Linux/KDE Plasma: (available in About System) KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.10 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.111.0 Qt Version: 5.15.11 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Those systems don't have cursor themes though; we do. Doesn't that replace the need for this?
Theoretically it does, but in practice it isn't ideal. Let's say you want to use the standard breeze cursor theme but want the cursor color to be a different color, for instance light green to improve contrast. As there is currently no way to natively change color, you have use the "Get new" window to look through the thousands of cursor themes to find something fitting and for my example you would still come up short. With a quick search I found some breeze themes with different color outlines, but not body. Of course you could also copy the breeze icon theme and change the body color in the SVG(?) and therefore get to the wanted outcome, but no non geeky user will do that. That's why I propose that next to the current options of setting the cursor size, there should be an option to set cursor color. This color selector would probably only work for the breeze cursors and would be disabled (grayed out or whatever) for any non default cursor themes. If someone wants to change the color of a non default cursor theme, they can use the theming options. But for a normal user that is just rolling with Plasma defaults, there should in my opinion be an easy way to do this. Windows is btw. in the same situation, they support (legacy support in an old menu, but support) cursor themes as well as "natively" changing cursor color and size. I just tried it out and changing the size or color with a custom theme applied, just defaults the cursor back to the standard one with the changed size or color applied. That is not the most elegant solution but it works.
I get your point. It's something that we receive a lot of requests for in other contexts too; people want to change *just this one* Plasma setting: make the panel shadow go away, or change the panel background color, or remove the header area on top, and so on. "Just one thing! Why does it have to be themable when I want to change just one thing!" The problem is that everyone wants to change a different just one thing. Accommodating that with explicit settings it simply not feasible, I'm afraid. We would end up offering so many settings that it would, again, defeat the point of themability. Now, maybe there are fewer things about the standard Breeze cursor that people might want to customize. You've asked for the background color. But what about the outline color? And how about the pointiness? There's also the interface where the tail connects to the arrow; I know for a fact that people have Opinions™ about that. Hopefully you can see where this is going. :) There is precedent for changing color schemes of a theme, though. Unfortunately cursor themes aren't easily compatible with this since they use a legacy XCursor theming file format, not something nice like SVG (and this is why we can't have nice sharp upscaled cursors for free). I'd *love* if we broke compatibility with the cursor theme spec and offered nice SVG cursors, and then your request here would be feasible to implement as well. Unfortunately that is a significantly larger project that may not even be feasible at all due to the existence of legacy X11 apps.
I've played around with the cursor themes in a VM and I now have better understand the technical aspects. Thanks for giving me the pointer to the use of bitmaps, this obviously complicates things a lot. This issue obviously isn't a priority nor should it be but in respect to it being "*just this one*" feature that I want, I have to push back a bit. While I completely understand the sentiment, the changing of the cursor size *and color* is the only accessibility feature I personally know multiple people to use. (I don't personally use it, but I was surprised when I saw plasma didn't have it.) Also the fact that Windows, MacOS and ChromeOS have implemented this feature tells me, that there is a somewhat common need for this feature. With the limitations of the XCursor spec the probably only feasible way to have customize able cursor colors would be to ship a few preselected color schemes as default. This would no be very elegant but would mostly solve the problem. As an aside, Plasma (at least on Arch) already ships multiple color variations of the Oxygen cursor theme. Therefore it doesn't seem to unreasonable to add some high contrast versions of the Breeze theme. Maybe someone that would actually use this could chime in to better articulate the need.
Shipping multiple colors of the Breeze cursor theme to match what Oxygen does seems like a reasonable workaround to me. Feel free to submit a new bug report requesting that. It would go to Breeze | Icons.
This might be more realistic now with SVG cursors on the roadmap for 6.2 (https://invent.kde.org/plasma/breeze/-/merge_requests/433). Would it make sense to reopen this bug or is this request still out of scope?
Yep, that'll unlock this.