Unity8 mouse cursor never changes when moving over widgets in app windows

[kevin gunn]

Mouse cursor never changes when moving over widgets in app windows (e.g. 'I' cursor for a text editor).

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

Yeah, this requires us to resolve the cursor situation between unity8 and unity-system-compositor.

As previously discussed, having it drawn by u-s-c (aka "hardware" cursor) is nice for performance reasons, at least until the shell can leverage hwc. But then having to communicate to u-s-c how it should be drawn would be too weird.

I was wondering then, could we have a small separate surface that unity8 draws the cursor to, that u-s-c then picks up and puts in a layer above the shell as applicable? We'd need to communicate the location of the cursor "point" relative to the surface to make it happen, though.

Thoughts?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Alexandros Frantzis (afrantzis)]

There are two distinct tasks involved on the Mir side:

1. Forward cursor requests from Unity8 clients to USC (in general, from nested clients to host servers). Support for this was recently added to lp:mir (r2515).

2. Enable Unity8 handle input in relation to windows, grab handles etc. Although this should be doable with what released versions of Mir currently offer, the new window management interface should make it more straightforward.

The main blocker for this feature is (1), so I am going to marki this as 'fix commited' on the Mir side.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package mir - 0.13.1+15.10.20150520-0ubuntu1

---------------
mir (0.13.1+15.10.20150520-0ubuntu1) wily; urgency=medium

  [ Cemil Azizoglu ]
  * New upstream release 0.13.1 (https://launchpad.net/mir/+milestone/0.13.1)
    - ABI summary: No ABI break. Servers and clients do not need rebuilding.
      . Mirclient ABI unchanged at 8
      . Mircommon ABI unchanged at 4
      . Mirplatform ABI unchanged at 7
      . Mirserver ABI unchanged at 31
    - Bug fixes:
      . Can't load app purchase UI without a U1 account (LP: #1450377)
      . Crash because uncaught exception in mir::events::add_touch (LP: #1437357)

 -- CI Train Bot <email address hidden> Wed, 20 May 2015 21:20:15 +0000

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Just noticed this in Xmir too. Although Xmir and Mir demo servers seem to change the mouse cursor fine now, Unity8 hasn't implemented the same yet.

Just try running "gedit" and expect the cursor to change between text selection and arrow as you move it around.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Although in my case, running Xmir in Unity8 the cursor gets stuck on the text selection "I" one.

[Lukáš Tinkl (lukas-kde)]

This should work fine already in regular apps, not sure about xmir

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Nope, Unity8 still lacks cursor-changing support (for arbitrary Mir clients, not Qt).

Try Xmir or just try this simple test case:

1. mir_demo_client_cursors -- --desktop_file_hint=unity8
2. Leave your mouse cursor over the new window.

Expected: Cursor changes every second.
Observed: Cursor never changes when run under Unity8.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Another test case:
   mir_demo_client_animated_cursor -- --desktop_file_hint=unity8

This one shows Unity8 gets the first frame OK, but never updates.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package qtmir - 0.4.8+16.10.20160520.1-0ubuntu1

---------------
qtmir (0.4.8+16.10.20160520.1-0ubuntu1) yakkety; urgency=medium

  [ Alan Griffiths ]
  * Reduce coupling to MirServer - it has been misused as a context
    object.

  [ Daniel d'Andrada ]
  * Also interpret the cursor names used by Mir client API (LP:
    #1447839)
  * Application: Don't respawn if closed while still starting up (LP:
    #1575577)

  [ Daniel d'Andrada, Michał Sawicz ]
  * Centralize logging categories

  [ Gerry Boland ]
  * UAL can throw on creating Application if invalid appId, catch
    instead of aborting (LP: #1578258)

  [ Timo Jyrinki ]
  * Use FindQt5PlatformSupport to find platform support, other methods
    not available on Qt 5.6 anymore. (LP: #1554404)

 -- Michał Sawicz <email address hidden> Fri, 20 May 2016 08:41:51 +0000

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Note this bug wasn't really fixed.

New bugs covering the same issues are still pending -> bug 1605078 and bug 1604701