Adwaita Highlight Cursor Theme

This is a hacky way to create RPMs for the highlight variant of the Adwaita cursor theme. The necessary changes were sent upstream but are not (yet) accepted.

In the meantime I use this hacky setup to create the RPMs to install the files in a controlled way. It uses my clone of the adwaita-cursors repository to build the files, creates a local SRPM file from it, and then builds the .noarch.rpm file which can be installed.

I'm using the cursor theme for screen sharing sessions or for recording. This simple shell script is used to toggle between the normal and the highlight version of the Adwaita cursors:

 #!/bin/bash
 current=$(gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-theme)
 if [ $current = "'Adwaita'" ]; then
   gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-theme Adwaita-highlight
   gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-size 96
 else
   gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-theme Adwaita
   gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-size 36
 fi

With this scripts available through a hotkey one can quickly switch back and forth from and to the highlight theme. In my case the script is triggered by a key on the StreamDeck which makes it vary convenient. The sizes chosen might have to be adjusted. With the 4k screens I use this is needed when the entire screen is shared/recorded because otherwise the cursor is too small.

Prerequisites

To create the cursor binaries varies compile time dependencies are needed.

• xcursorgen
• python2
• python3
• inkscape

as well as several python modules. In addition to the modules needed by the original cursors packages the highlight theme also need python3-pypng.