[Info-vax] Change Mouse Pointer Color

[John E. Malmberg]

On 12/3/2018 7:33 AM, Jairo Alves wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> The mouse pointer seems to be too small and too missable
> for some of the customers.
> 
> They've asked me for some way to make it white. We work
> with Industrial Automation support and all Scada screens
> have black background.
> 
> I've found in the forums this rather old post by now:
> 
>> I asked Digital and they told me the following:
>> - open a terminal window
>> - at the prompt type "MC decw$session"
>> - you will see a menu bar where you can select "Options"
>>    and then "Pointer".
> 
> I tried it, and indeed it works as stated, only when the
> session is open and only when the pointer is over the Desktop.
> 
> So as soon as you would enter any other program, it would
> revert back to its black and small state.
> 
> I wonder as quite some time has passed if any new solutions
> for this issue has been found.

I have no idea.  It has been a very long time since I looked at X11 in 
that detail.

Have you tried contacting your SCADA vendor for support?

X11 has a hierarchy of what it looks at for properties.

Since you can change it for a "Session Manager" session, this indicates 
that nothing below that level is specifying the mouse pointer properties.

The session manager is optional with X11, and for SCADA may have been 
skipped since each session manager process in a commercial environment 
uses a VMS user license from the user pool.

You may need to look at what ever is being used as an X-11 display to 
see if you can change the default pointer characteristics.  For linux 
based packages, that would usually be in a data file.

It may also be a property that you can set for the SCADA package.  Since 
it can be set as a global X11 property, it may not be in that specific 
documentation.  Look to see if there is any (possibly optional) data 
file with the SCADA program that can contain X-11 resources.

When you specified the mouse pointer settings, if you saved the 
settings, it should have created/modified a file in sys$login:, usually 
of the format decw$*.dat.

Typically X-11 programs when they start up read such a file.

So you should be able to try copying the settings from the modfied 
decw$<something>.dat to the resource file used by the SCADA software, 
assuming that it uses one.

Regards,
-John