Configuring Mouse Cursor Style for GTK Applications in KDE Desktop

Update on Jan. 7, 2012: The package for the gtk application style setting on KDE 4.7 is kcm-gtk. The command to install this package is: “# yum install kcm-gtk”.

One annoying thing when using KDE desktop is that the theme and style of GTK applications differ from KDE’s. The gtk-qt-engine can let us select the theme for GTK applications in KDE desktop environment. But the mouse cursors for GTK application and QT applications are different if we set the cursor style in KDE’s setting tools. The cursor for GTK application changes to the default one when moving cursor from the desktop to GTK application such as Firefox. The is quite annoying. In this article, we will introduce a piece of tip to make the cursor the same style in both GTK and QT applications.

First, the gtk-qt-engine should have been installed to configure the theme for GTK application. If not, install it like this:

# yum install gtk-qt-engine

You can find the cursor icons which you are using in KDE under /usr/share/icons/. Let’s use “Oxygen_Blue” which is my favourite one as the example.

After installing gtk-qt-engine, there is one configuration file for it: ~/.gtkrc-2.0-kde4. It may be a little different depending on the package version.

To set the cursor icon theme for GTK application to “Oxygen_Blue”, add this line into ~/.gtkrc-2.0-kde4:

gtk-cursor-theme-name="Oxygen_Blue"

It can be changed to any icon theme’s name that we like. We may need to reload the KDE desktop after changing it. After reloading the desktop environment, try to open a GTK application and see whether the icons are the same in both kind of applications.