Eli Zaretskii writes: > > So now I'm confused: why is this a bug? I don't know why you are suddenly confused, because the description of the bug has not changed. I have simply located the exact parts of the code responsible for (one half of) the problem, i.e. the cause of the mouse pointer border color being set to the frame background color. Maybe my description of the issue I observe has not been clear enough. Since you have not seen it first-hand, I attach an image which illustrates the difference in mouse pointer caused by setting the emacs frame background via the --background argument. (I don't know how well image attachments work, if at all, on the mailing list, so I apologize if the image does not make it through. Please let me know if it doesn't reach you.) The pointer to the left is how it normally looks, when emacs has not modified it and the original Xorg pointer is still intact. As you can see it is very easily visible, even against a dark background, thanks to the border color. The pointer on the right is the result of setting the frame background color through the --background argument. As you can see the pointer is now much less visible, since the border around the pointer is the exact same color as the frame background. Note that in neither of the examples have I set any custom mouse color, so I would expect it to remain unchanged in both. After finding the code I pointed to in my previous message, I realized that this is in fact a two-part problem. Part 1 is that x_set_mouse_color incorrectly uses the background color of the current (or default?) frame as the color of the border/outline of the mouse pointer. This makes that border in effect become completely invisible when hovering over the emacs frame, which can make the mouse pointer very hard to see. Part 2 is that the act of setting a default frame background color causes x_set_mouse_color to even be called in the first place. The mouse color should obviously not be changed as a side effect of changing the frame background color. These are two very different things that has nothing to do with eachother. I have identified the cause of part 1, but I have not (yet) found the cause of part 2.