"Stephen J Baker" <sjba...@link.com> wrote:

For X11, using the ordinary cursor up the maximum size is obvious; whether then to use a masked pixmap or chain of line segments is a matter of benchmarking under different circumstances (remote vs local X server, different server cleverness etc).

For instance, a masked pixmap requires little bandwidth once it has been transferred to the server, but might be slow if the server handles sparse masked blits in a bad way. Line segments need more bandwidth per mouse motion but are potentially cheaper to render. Implementing either is not hard, but I (being primarily an Xlib programmer) don't know how if gdk/gtk have the necessary primitives