I’m trying to set up a new mouse cursor theme on my Ubuntu 16.04, and everything I look up keeps telling that me it stores the icons in the /usr/share/icons
folder, but there's nothing in this folder at all (I do have show hidden files enabled). Am I doing something wrong?
Every tutorial on Ask Ubuntu, and every single help desk site, keeps telling me that the cursor icons are stored there, but they’re not there for some reason. All I want to do is figure out how to install a simple mouse cursor icon that I downloaded.
But how can I follow all the step by step tutorials online, when I can’t even complete step one since I can’t find where the cursors are stored?
Best Answer
The cursors are indeed installed in the
/usr/share/icons
folder. User specific cursor themes can be installed in~/.local/share/icons
folder. You might have got confused because of all those icon themes there.Ubuntu treats icon themes and cursor themes similarly. However, the cursor theme folder includes an
index.theme
file andcursors
folder. This differentiates them from regular icon themes.Creating a custom cursor theme
Creating a custom cursor theme involves basically these three steps
First Create a directory naming it as the Cursor theme name. For example,
Clear
.Create a folder named
cursors
that folder. You'll put your cursors files in this folder. The cursors should be named following specific naming guide line (Check the linked Ubuntu forum page for the guideline). You can also find the names from the default cursor themeDMZ-White
.Create a file named
index.theme
in the same level ascursors
folder. The content of the file should be like these.The
Name
field's value is cursor theme name. It is cAsE-SenSitiVe. So, make sure this is exactly same as the folder name. TheComment
field can contain any line of text.Tools:
xcursorgen
helpful. It converts a PNG image to Xcursor format file which can be used as a cursor. It comes withx11-apps
package.Additionally, Check these links for further help