pygame.cursors

pygame module for cursor resources

pygame.cursors.compile	—	create binary cursor data from simple strings
pygame.cursors.load_xbm	—	load cursor data from an xbm file

Pygame offers control over the system hardware cursor. Pygame only supports black and white cursors for the system. You control the cursor with functions inside pygame.mousepygame module to work with the mouse.

This cursors module contains functions for loading and unencoding various cursor formats. These allow you to easily store your cursors in external files or directly as encoded python strings.

The module includes several standard cursors. The pygame.mouse.set_cursor() function takes several arguments. All those arguments have been stored in a single tuple you can call like this:

>>> pygame.mouse.set_cursor(*pygame.cursors.arrow)

This module also contains a few cursors as formatted strings. You’ll need to pass these to pygame.cursors.compile() function before you can use them. The example call would look like this:

>>> cursor = pygame.cursors.compile(pygame.cursors.textmarker_strings)
>>> pygame.mouse.set_cursor(*cursor)

The following variables are cursor bitmaps that can be used as cursor:

• pygame.cursors.arrow
• pygame.cursors.diamond
• pygame.cursors.broken_x
• pygame.cursors.tri_left
• pygame.cursors.tri_right

The following strings can be converted into cursor bitmaps with pygame.cursors.compile() :

• pygame.cursors.thickarrow_strings
• pygame.cursors.sizer_x_strings
• pygame.cursors.sizer_y_strings
• pygame.cursors.sizer_xy_strings

pygame.cursors.compile()

create binary cursor data from simple strings

compile(strings, black=’X’, white=’.’, xor=’o’) -> data, mask

A sequence of strings can be used to create binary cursor data for the system cursor. The return values are the same format needed by pygame.mouse.set_cursor().

If you are creating your own cursor strings, you can use any value represent the black and white pixels. Some system allow you to set a special toggle color for the system color, this is also called the xor color. If the system does not support xor cursors, that color will simply be black.

The width of the strings must all be equal and be divisible by 8. An example set of cursor strings looks like this

thickarrow_strings = (               #sized 24x24
  "XX                      ",
  "XXX                     ",
  "XXXX                    ",
  "XX.XX                   ",
  "XX..XX                  ",
  "XX...XX                 ",
  "XX....XX                ",
  "XX.....XX               ",
  "XX......XX              ",
  "XX.......XX             ",
  "XX........XX            ",
  "XX........XXX           ",
  "XX......XXXXX           ",
  "XX.XXX..XX              ",
  "XXXX XX..XX             ",
  "XX   XX..XX             ",
  "     XX..XX             ",
  "      XX..XX            ",
  "      XX..XX            ",
  "       XXXX             ",
  "       XX               ",
  "                        ",
  "                        ",
  "                        ")

pygame.cursors.load_xbm()

load cursor data from an xbm file

load_xbm(cursorfile) -> cursor_args

load_xbm(cursorfile, maskfile) -> cursor_args

This loads cursors for a simple subset of XBM files. XBM files are traditionally used to store cursors on unix systems, they are an ascii format used to represent simple images.

Sometimes the black and white color values will be split into two separate XBM files. You can pass a second maskfile argument to load the two images into a single cursor.

The cursorfile and maskfile arguments can either be filenames or filelike object with the readlines method.

The return value cursor_args can be passed directly to the pygame.mouse.set_cursor() function.