public final class Cursor
extends Boxed

That which indicateth where your mouse is pointing!

A Cursor object must be bound to a underlying Window before [changing it] will actually cause what the user sees to change; see setCursor() on the Window here in org.gnome.gdk.

Quite frequently you want to change the Cursor for the entire application (in a manner reminiscent of modal behaviour). This is trickier than it should be, but you've got a couple possibilities. You can either

• maintain a list of all the significant [org.gnome.gtk] Windows being displayed by your application and then call getWindow().setCursor(BLAH) on each of them, or you can
• use getToplevels() on [org.gnome.gdk] Window and then similarly just call setCursor(BLAH) as you iterate over the returned set.

The first option is a bit more cumbersome, but many people find themselves maintaining a list of "major" Windows for other purposes, so it can serve.

Almost inevitably the Cursor your want is BUSY which is the spinning "busy" pointer. You can revert to "normal" by setting NORMAL directly (which is the default cursor you spend most of your time looking at), or by passing null to setCursor().

Note that different theme engines (let alone different Linux vendors) tend to screw with the default pointer icons set quite a bit, so you may find that pointers appear very different for users on different distributions.

Our implementation of Cursor assumes you want to manipulate GdkCursors on the "default" GdkDisplay. Where else would you be working?