It's a redrawing of cursor-toolbox to Fallout 2-like cursor. This repo contains only the essentials.
Clone or download the files of this repository to your local machine. If downloaded via the green github button top right then unpack the zip file. To render the PNGs the vector editing software Inkskape is used. For combining the PNGs to X11 cursor files you’ll need the command line tool xcursorgen.
If you just want to generate a theme out of the provided SVG you can skip this step and proceed with generating the PNGs. Otherwise start by editing the file template.svg in the folder svgs with Inkscape.
The template.svg contains three layers. On the layer cursors there’s a group of the different cursors. It is cloned to the second, semi-transparent layer shadow, slightly translated and blurred. The third layer slices contains rectangles with the ID of the individual cursors. It is set to invisible because it should not get rendered as a cursor background.
By the way the colors of the slices layer are only important for the example cursor file. They could be helpful if you just want make small edits to the provided theme. Pink signals that this cursor contains or consists of cloned other cursors. Teal means that this cursor doesn’t follow the standard of 1px black stroke, white filling. It may contain blurred shadow lines, other colors, stroke widths or areas without an outline.
For each cursor you have to determine the spot where the mouse tip is located. It is described in a file in the folder hotspots. Each cursor has one file with lines like
24 11 1 ../pngs/24/center_ptr.png
32 16 2 ../pngs/32/center_ptr.png
48 22 2 ../pngs/48/center_ptr.png
These stand for [size] [x coordinate] [y coordinate] [path to png]. The path later is important for combining different sized PNGs to one cursor file. It’s relative to the hotspots folder.
To get the coordinates in Inkscape make the slices layer visible and turn on a pixel grid. The top left pixel has the coordinates 0 0, the top right one has 23 0. So you can count where the mouse tip should sit.
For the animated cursors the frames duration is added to the end of each line. If you want each frames take 60 milliseconds then write
24 11 11 ../pngs/24/wait-01.png 60
24 11 11 ../pngs/24/wait-02.png 60
24 11 11 ../pngs/24/wait-03.png 60
24 11 11 ../pngs/24/wait-04.png 60
...
If you edited the template.svg make sure the layer slices is invisible. Then open a terminal and navigate to the cursor-toolbox folder using the command cd /path/to/cursor-toolbox. Now we’re ready to go!
The Python file render-pngs.py combs through template.svg and searches for rectangles on the slices layer. It exports the vectors in these areas to PNGs named after the rectangle’s ID. To start rendering use the command
./render-pngs.py svgs/template.svg
Or, if you prefer the black-theme:
./render-pngs.py svgs/template-black.svg
This creates the folder pngs with all the images – it may take some time. If you want other sizes than 24×24, 32×32 and 48×48 then edit the lines 68, 74 and 75 in render-pngs.py before.
The animated cursor of my theme cz-Viator is a rotating windmill. However I’ve created some alternative designs (there are black variants, too):
If you’d like to employ one of these, now it’s the right time! Let render-pngs.py do it’s work again, only using the preferred spinner file this time (one of these lines):
./render-pngs.py svgs/spinner-hourglass.svg
./render-pngs.py svgs/spinner-ring.svg
./render-pngs.py svgs/spinner-rotor.svg
./render-pngs.py svgs/spinner-windmill.svg
… or with the equivalent variant *-black.svg. The PNGs of the cursors wait and progress will be overwritten.
We use the shell script make.sh to combine the right PNGs and generate X11 cursor files. The script also creates the correct folder structure and symbolic links for a ready-to-use theme.
To name your theme open make.sh with your prefered text editor. Fill in your own theme name in line 6 (themetitle='My Cursor Theme'). Save and close make.sh. Now run the file with the command
./make.sh
Your finished cursor theme is in the new folder with your given name. (For the next steps I’ll call that “theme folder”).
To install the theme for a single user copy the theme folder into the hidden folder .icons in your home directory – if neccessary create this folder. You can do this with the terminal, too. Replace the [theme-folder] with the name of the generated folder from step 2.3.
cp -r [theme-folder] ~/.icons/[theme-folder]
To install the cursor theme system-wide, copy your folder to /usr/share/icons. You’ll need to run the command as the system administrator, so you’ll be prompted for your system password:
sudo cp -r [theme-folder] usr/share/icons/[theme-folder]
Original theme, scripts: Gerhard Großmann (postfach2b@web.de)
Redrawed cursors and windmill, recoloring other: TerminalHash (lyashuk.voxx@gmail.com)