I would like to share a little something I worked on the other day, just for fun.

I wanted to “doctor” the default “hand” Cursor in Ubuntu so I Googled it and found a great plugin for GIMP (a FREE Linux equivalent of Photoshop). So I downloaded this X11 Mouse Cursor (XMC) plug-in and installed it. This made it easy because I could just open up any X11 Cursor file right in GIMP and edit it like any other multi-layer image file.

So I chose to start by opening the “hand2” cursor file from the whiteglass theme (on my system this file was found in `/usr/share/icons/whiteglass/cursors/`).

Then I quickly made a few small changes to each of the 5 layers and saved it in my Downloads folder as “handeli.xmc“.

Next I had to replace the the default X11 Cursor file with my newly modified version. To do this I ran the following commands (if you run Linux on your computer you can download my modified Cursor file and run these commands to install it):

sudo mv /usr/share/icons/whiteglass/cursors/hand2 /usr/share/icons/whiteglass/cursors/hand0
sudo mv Downloads/handeli.xmc /usr/share/icons/whiteglass/cursors/hand2
gnome-appearance-properties

Click the “Customize…” Button on the “Appearance Preferences” window, switch to the “Pointer” Tab on the “Customize Theme” window, and choose “whiteglass” from the list of pointers.

If you don’t run Linux on your computer then “Doom on you!”, download Ubuntu now!

Just in case you are too lazy to change your operating system and install this Cursor, here is a small GIF of what it looks like.