GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 318056
"Cursor" and "Pointer" terminology used interchangeably in gnome-control-center
Last modified: 2006-01-28 15:45:30 UTC
It seems the words "cursor" and "pointer" are present in many translateable gnome-control-center messages (see attached list of messages). However, what is confusing is that they seem to be used interchangeably in gnome-control-center messages. Of course, this terminology confusion does not help when messages are supposed to be translated -- it usually means that the translated end result will be even more confusing. This is how I interpret the words "cursor" and "pointer" (please correct me if I 'm wrong): * Cursor - something that blinks inside text fields and moves as you type * Pointer - something on the screen that moves as you move the mouse or some other pointing device So, why does the gnome-mouse-properties capplet talk about "cursors"? Certainly users expect to modify their pointer in the mouse capplet?
Created attachment 53079 [details] The po messages that use the words cursor or pointer
I agree with Christian here. I interpret "cursor" to be where text insertion will occur, and "pointer" to be where a mouse click will occur. However, it is possible to change the look of the X text cursor, and some of the strings do seem to be dealing with text cursors. I think that it'd be good for a developer familiar with the context of each string to do a once-over and make sure that cursor refers to cursor, and pointer refers to pointer.
xorg calls the mouse pointer "cursor" (libxcursor)
Then xorg is wrong. See http://developer.gnome.org/documents/style-guide/gnome-glossary-generic-terms.html
Created attachment 57807 [details] [review] Patch for gnome-settings-daemon (reply to an email from Joachim Noreiko) #: ../gnome-settings-daemon/gnome-settings-font.c:107 #, c-format msgid "" "Cannot create the directory \"%s\".\n" "This is needed to allow changing cursors." This string is used to print an error if the directory "~/.gnome2/share/cursor-fonts" could not be created. (an unfortunate name for this directory, but understandable because X calls them cursors). Attached patch fixes the wording in gnome-settings-daemon. I don't know if it's worth changing the name of the directory to pointer-fonts or mouse-pointer-fonts...
Created attachment 57812 [details] [review] Patch for mouse capplet This should fix all remaining uses of "Cursor" in all capplets. I only touched UI-visible strings -- filenames, etc. remain "cursor". This patch should be applied along with the previous patch to gnome-settings-daemon.
Committed to HEAD, thanks