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Asked: 2013-01-01 01:16:02 +0800 CST

How to change Guake cursor from block to I-Beam?

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As the title says, I want to change the cursor of Guake to I-Beam (the vertical line). I find block cursor to be confusing sometimes. I looked into the preferences but unfortunately there is no option for the cursor. Is it possible to change?

cursor

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    There is a patch at guake.org, which you can download to patch the source code, compile and install the program. This is the only way at present to get the option you want; it does work though (see screenshots below). This is how I did it.

    The patch should be downloaded from here as a file; it is designed to work with the 0.42 source code, but could be tweaked to work with any source code available, such as the more recent 0.4.4. (Inspecting the 0.4.4 source code suggests that the patch might be implemented in that version, but when compiled, the option to switch to i-beam cursor didn't seem to work.)

    However, it is straightforward to use the 0.42 source code, so download that file, cd to the downloads folder with terminal and unpack it with:

    tar xzvf guake-0.4.2.tar.gz

    Before you do anything else, remove the current version of guake if you have it installed, and then install the build dependencies and other tools with:

    sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall 
sudo apt-get build-dep guake

    As noted in my comment, to get the build-dep feature to work, you need to go to software sources and enable source code by checking the box. Then run sudo apt-get update and any build-dep commands should work. The build dependencies are also listed in the Readme file with the source code download as python-dev, libgconf2-dev, libgtk2.0-dev, python-gtk-dev.

    Now, while in the folder in which you downloaded the files, copy the patch to the guake folder with

    cp CursorShape.patch guake-0.4.2/

    Next, cd to the guake folder and patch the source code with

    patch -p1 < CursorShape.patch

    Then configure and build the files with

    ./configure && make

    The final step is to run

    sudo checkinstall

    but when you install it, make sure you specify the version number in the checkinstall menu as not 0.4.2, but 0.4.3 or something similar, as you will constantly be prompted to overwrite your custom version with the package version (0.4.2) if you don't specify a higher version number.

    Screenshots showing the patched version preferences and the guake terminal respectively.

    enter image description here

    enter image description here

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