How I can set default cursors theme for current user

Question

I don't want to edit

/usr/share/icons/default/index.theme

or change alternatives

update-alternatives --config x-cursor-theme

because different users use different cursors theme. So I need to specify it for current users. I try to use following locations

~/.icons/default
~/.local/share/icons/default

but without success.

Answer 1

I believe this question was partially answered, since the answer only specifies how to install a theme.

Yes, to install additional mouse cursor (x11) themes for the current user, the theme must be placed in the "~/.icons" directory.

Now to set it, "gnome-tweak-tool" should be installed.

sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool

After having installed gnome-tweak-tool, open it and navigate to Theme, and choose your Cursor theme from there. Please note, setting your cursor theme through there will only change it for certain applications.

Now comes the tricky part, setting the theme without modifying the /usr/share/icons/default/index.theme file.

In your ~/.icons directory, create a directory named "default". Then, inside that directory, create an "index.theme" file. Open it with your preferable text editor, and add the following settings to it:

[Icon Theme]
Inherits=<cursor theme name>

Then log out, and log in again, you should see your new cursor theme appear just for that user account. I believe this is what's going on. When loading a cursor theme, the system would first check for a ~/.icons/default/index.theme file, and if it cannot find it, then it will use the system's version (/usr/share/icons/default/index.theme).

Answer 2

@WarriorIng64 You can install additional mouse themes from the Ubuntu Software Center. Additionally, you can manually install new themes such as those from gnome-look.org by extracting the theme folders into /usr/share/icons/ or ~/.icons. (Source for manual installation)

How to change the mouse pointer theme