Home / ubuntu / Questions / 676722
Accepted
hg8
Asked: 2015-09-22 09:10:07 +0800 CST

Small cursor when hovering Unity interface on HiDPI display

  • 772

I have a 4k display. By default the Ubuntu Unity interface is small and hardly readable.

After changing Parameters > Display and Scale for menu and title bars to 2
the interface is now perfectly readable.

The problem is when the mouse cursor hovers over unity interface items (like Taskbar or System Settings for example) the mouse cursor is not scaled anymore and becomes 2 times smaller. The same happens in Nemo File Browser.

small cursor HiDPI screen

This problem appears in Ubuntu 14.04 but also in Ubuntu 15.04.

What is the cause of this problem ? Can I solve it ?

unity

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    For Ubuntu 14.04 & 15.04 (not working in 15.10)

    It in fact is a bug in Unity.

    On a high DPI screen (220 DPI) the mouse cursor is really tiny when hovering unity elements. There are various keys in dconf to change the cursor's scale factor or size. I've managed to change it in a way that it looks normal when inside application windows, but its still tiny when on unity elements. (exerpt from Lauchpad)

    Until an update fixes the problem, you can use this workaround :

    sudo nano /etc/X11/Xresources/x11-common

    Add the following line to the end of the file:

    Xcursor*size: 48

    Then save your changes. Close and re-open your sessions and your are done.

    Alternatively, this could be solved by exporting:

    export XCURSOR_SIZE=48

    somewhere in unity startup code.

    • 3