wayland desktop mouse cursor size

[zi...@freebsd.org]

Hello,

I'm having trouble with mouse cursor size. On my 14" 2650x1600 display,
the mouse cursor is about half a terminal character in height. The
wayland compositor I'm using, labwc, recommends to set the size with the
XCURSOR_SIZE environment variable, however this does nothing on my box.
I am not using moused with `moused_nondefault_enable="NO"` in rc.conf.

Anyone know how this works?

Best,
Alex

[Jan Beich]

(x11@ may still be better than questions@ for Wayland stuff)

<zi...@FreeBSD.org> writes:

> I'm having trouble with mouse cursor size. On my 14" 2650x1600 display,
> the mouse cursor is about half a terminal character in height. The
> wayland compositor I'm using, labwc, recommends to set the size with the
> XCURSOR_SIZE environment variable, however this does nothing on my box.
> I am not using moused with `moused_nondefault_enable="NO"` in rc.conf.

Did you set XCURSOR_THEME as well? Setting XCURSOR_SIZE alone is illegal.

> Anyone know how this works?

Depends on app. There're 3 ways cursors are set:
- by client (default, via XCURSOR_SIZE + XCURSOR_THEME)
- by server (cursor-shape-v1 protocol, via compositor config)
- by xwayland (via Xcursor.size + Xcursor.theme in ~/.Xdefaults or xrdb)

See also https://blogs.kde.org/2024/10/09/cursor-size-problems-in-wayland-explained/

[Alexander Ziaee]

On 2026-03-06 15:14 -05:00 EST, "Jan Beich" <jbe...@FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> (x11@ may still be better than questions@ for Wayland stuff)
>
> <zi...@FreeBSD.org> writes:
>
>> I'm having trouble with mouse cursor size. On my 14" 2650x1600 display,
>> the mouse cursor is about half a terminal character in height. The
>> wayland compositor I'm using, labwc, recommends to set the size with the
>> XCURSOR_SIZE environment variable, however this does nothing on my box.
>> I am not using moused with `moused_nondefault_enable="NO"` in rc.conf.
>
> Did you set XCURSOR_THEME as well? Setting XCURSOR_SIZE alone is illegal.

Ah! That did it! Thank you so much. I didn't see this in the doc, so I made a pull upstream:

https://github.com/labwc/labwc/pull/3427

>> Anyone know how this works?
>
> Depends on app. There're 3 ways cursors are set:
> - by client (default, via XCURSOR_SIZE + XCURSOR_THEME)
> - by server (cursor-shape-v1 protocol, via compositor config)
> - by xwayland (via Xcursor.size + Xcursor.theme in ~/.Xdefaults or xrdb)
>
> See also https://blogs.kde.org/2024/10/09/cursor-size-problems-in-wayland-explained/

Nice!

Thanks again,
Alex