Mouse cursor invisible when hovering over file picker

[byte-bandit]

Hyprland version

Hyprland 0.48.1 built from branch  at commit 29e2e59fdbab8ed2cc23a20e3c6043d5decb5cdc  (version: bump to v0.48.1).
Date: Fri Mar 28 16:16:07 2025
Tag: v0.48.1, commits: 5937
built against:
 aquamarine 0.8.0
 hyprlang 0.6.0
 hyprutils 0.5.2
 hyprcursor 0.1.12
 hyprgraphics 0.1.2

no flags were set

Regression

It used to work, but I also changed to uwsm recently, and also from Nvidia to amdgpu. I'm not sure if any of this would have an impact on this.

Describe the bug

I'm not entirely sure this is the correct category, feel free to move.

Basically what the title says. When I move the mouse over the xdg-desktop-portal-gtk file picker window, it becomes invisible - but only the default cursor. The resizing cursor (when hovering over e.g. the bar seperator between window panels) is still rendered correctly. I'm using hwg-look to configure the cursor & icon themes for GTK3 XWayland windows - but the picker doesn't seem to be using either.

Notice how both Heroic & the file picker window are xwayland windows, but only the file picker window experiences this issue.

Window 5d717e8cf7d0 -> Heroic Games Launcher:
	mapped: 1
	hidden: 0
	at: 22,62
	size: 2516,1356
	workspace: 4 (4)
	floating: 0
	pseudo: 0
	monitor: 0
	class: heroic
	title: Heroic Games Launcher
	initialClass: heroic
	initialTitle: Heroic Games Launcher
	pid: 2561
	xwayland: 1
	pinned: 0
	fullscreen: 0
	fullscreenClient: 0
	grouped: 0
	tags: 
	swallowing: 0
	focusHistoryID: 2
	inhibitingIdle: 0

Window 5d717e92efa0 -> Select Executable:
	mapped: 1
	hidden: 0
	at: 638,219
	size: 1283,1001
	workspace: 4 (4)
	floating: 1
	pseudo: 0
	monitor: 0
	class: Xdg-desktop-portal-gtk
	title: Select Executable
	initialClass: Xdg-desktop-portal-gtk
	initialTitle: Select Executable
	pid: 2384
	xwayland: 1
	pinned: 0
	fullscreen: 0
	fullscreenClient: 0
	grouped: 0
	tags: 
	swallowing: 0
	focusHistoryID: 3
	inhibitingIdle: 0

❯ cat ~/.config/uwsm/env 
export HYPRCURSOR_THEME=Vimix-cursor-white
export HYPRCURSOR_SIZE=24
export XCURSOR_THEME=Vimix-cursor-white
export XCURSOR_SIZE=24
export XCURSOR_PATH=~/.local/share/icons/

export XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland
export XDG_DATA_HOME=/home/glitch/.local/share
export WLR_NO_HARDWARE_CURSORS=1
export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt6ct

❯ cat ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini 
[Settings]
gtk-theme-name=Adwaita
gtk-icon-theme-name=Tela-circle-nord
gtk-font-name=Cantarell 11
gtk-cursor-theme-name=Vimix-cursor-white
gtk-cursor-theme-size=24
gtk-toolbar-style=GTK_TOOLBAR_ICONS
gtk-toolbar-icon-size=GTK_ICON_SIZE_LARGE_TOOLBAR
gtk-button-images=0
gtk-menu-images=0
gtk-enable-event-sounds=1
gtk-enable-input-feedback-sounds=0
gtk-xft-antialias=1
gtk-xft-hinting=1
gtk-xft-hintstyle=hintslight
gtk-xft-rgba=rgb
gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme=0

Any help to dig down what is causing this would be greatly appreciated.

Reproduction steps

1. Start an xwayland application that opens a file picker

System info and config

hyrpctl_sysinfo.log

[byte-bandit]

If the GTK file picker is launched from librefox, it's not running via xwayland and has completely different class and title properties. In this case though, the cursor is rendered just fine. I guess that's because Hyprland doesn't switch back to the XCURSOR backup?

Window 5d717e985a50 -> File Upload:
	mapped: 1
	hidden: 0
	at: 664,265
	size: 1231,949
	workspace: 2 (2)
	floating: 1
	pseudo: 0
	monitor: 0
	class: LibreWolf
	title: File Upload
	initialClass: LibreWolf
	initialTitle: File Upload
	pid: 8413
	xwayland: 0
	pinned: 0
	fullscreen: 0
	fullscreenClient: 0
	grouped: 0
	tags: 
	swallowing: 0
	focusHistoryID: 1
	inhibitingIdle: 0

[vaxerski]

Interesting. Does this happen with hw cursors disabled? (cursor:no_hardware_cursors = true)

[byte-bandit]

I'm still setting export WLR_NO_HARDWARE_CURSORS=1 though I'm not sure that's even needed anymore.

But adding

cursor { 
  no_hardware_cursors = true 
}

to my hyprland.conf unfortunately does not change the behavior :(

[byte-bandit]

Here's my attempt to screen grab the behavior:

recording.mp4

[vaxerski]

to me looks like a broken cursor theme. The picker looks XWayland, so it would very likely be a problem with your cursor theme (XWayland manages its own cursors)

[byte-bandit]

I thought so too, but I'm not sure. I've tried multiple different themes, and they all work just fine on other xwayland windows (i.e. on heroic, steam, discord). But all of them suffer from the same problem when I open the file picker. Do you have any suggestions on how I could further debug this? Thankful for any insights really.

Edit: I also noticed this behavior happening on Discord (which is electron, like Heroic), but I cannot reproduce it on Steam (which I believe is not an Electron app). So it seems like it might be related to this. A quick check on hyprctl clients shows that Steam (while labelled as xwayland: 1 opens this picker with xwayland: 0. The electron apps do not.

Edit 2: Okay, it seems definitely related to xwayland though, though some xwayland: 0 programs will spawn the picker with xwayland: 0 (librewolf, Steam). In those cases it works. Others will not (Heroic, Discord, Chromium).

[BlackFuffey]

I've also been experiencing this issue and I can confirm it is not because of bad xcursor theme.

When hyprcursor is enabled, in certain xwayland apps, especially in a lot of games and GTK2 apps, the cursor will become invisible like shown in the video, even with xcursor correctly set up.

If I disable hyprcursor, however, without changing any xcursor settings, this issue will be gone.

This has been the case for me since I started using hyprcursor, which is about 8 months ago.

[byte-bandit]

I can 100% confirm all of this. I have now disabled hyprcursor, and everything works perfectly fine. I'd be happy to investigate this further, but I have no idea where to start looking to be honest. I'm not very familiar with Wayland/X11 interoperability.