Retrosmart Xcursor (fork)

An "8-bit-esque" X11 & Windows cursor theme collection, featuring classic OS X ("Mac-ish") and vintage Windows ("Win-ish") styles.

This is a fork of retrosmart-x11-cursors by Manuel Domínguez López. Credit for the original artwork and design goes to him — see AUTHORS and NOTES.md for details on what changed in this fork.

What's new in this fork

• Multiple Cursor Styles: Includes mac-ish, win-ish, and cur-font cursor styles (src/base/).
• HiDPI Support: New sizes (32px, 64px, and 128px), rendered cleanly via nearest-neighbor scaling.
• Unified Color Schemes: Master configuration in schemes.yaml using clean outline and fill color fields.
• Streamlined Multi-Core Build: In-memory streaming directly to PNGs (no intermediate XPM files on disk) with parallel CPU execution (nproc).
• Theme Variants: 24 distinct theme variants (8 color schemes across 3 styles), each with plain and drop-shadow versions.

Some of this fork's tooling and docs were put together with AI assistance. The cursor artwork itself is hand-drawn/hand-edited pixel art.

Downloads

Releases are packaged into 4 archives — pick your platform and whether you want the classic black/white looks or the full extra-color set:

Archive	Contains
retrosmart-cursor-classic-<version>-linux.tar.gz	Classic + Inverted schemes, X11 (Mac-ish & Win-ish, plain + shadow)
retrosmart-cursor-classic-<version>-windows.zip	Classic + Inverted schemes, Windows .cur/.ani
retrosmart-cursor-extras-<version>-linux.tar.gz	All other color schemes (Catppuccin, Everforest, Gruvbox, Rosé Pine, Solarized Dark, …), X11
retrosmart-cursor-extras-<version>-windows.zip	Same extra schemes, Windows .cur/.ani

Grab both archives for your OS if you want everything.

Previews

Mac-ish Styles

Win-ish Styles

Cur-font Styles

Requirements

• bash
• ImageMagick (convert)
• xcursorgen (part of xorg-xcursor / libxcursor on most distros)
• python3 (with PyYAML and Pillow)

Building

git clone https://github.com/useless-anvil/retrosmart-cursor.git
cd retrosmart_source
make            # or: ./build.sh all

This runs the full pipeline:

1. Recolors, upscales, and rasterizes: Streams the 32px sources in src/base/ through in-memory recoloring (outline/fill), nearest-neighbor upscaling (32px, 64px, 128px), and optional drop-shadow effects straight into PNGs (no intermediate .xpm files written to disk).
2. Generates hotspot configs: Creates xcursorgen input files from data/hotspots.yaml.
3. Builds binary cursors: Generates final X11 cursor binaries, symlinked aliases (from data/links.txt), and index.theme files.

Output lands in build_themes/Linux/<theme-name>/ (and build_themes/Windows/<theme-name>/).

Other build targets:

./build.sh png      # recolor, upscale, and rasterize PNGs
./build.sh in       # generate xcursorgen input files only
./build.sh cursors  # build binaries/aliases/theme metadata only
./build.sh clean    # remove artifacts/ and build_themes/

• To tweak theme palettes: edit schemes.yaml.
• To change how a cursor looks: edit its file(s) in src/base/ (32px only).
• To change a cursor's hotspot (click point): edit data/hotspots.yaml.

License

GPL-3.0, inherited from the original project. See COPYING and LICENSE.