I’d like to make a custom help cursor by “badging” the built-in default mouse cursor with a question mark when the user is hovering over an object that can be clicked for context-sensitive help. I’d like this to work nicely across platforms/look-and-feels (to look consistent with the white Windows mouse and the black Mac mouse, for instance.) Is there a way to get the cursor Image from the current Toolkit so that I could generate a combined Image to set as the cursor?
This question points out that the information can’t be gotten from the Cursor object. There’s also a comment there that suggested fishing around in the JRE, which I’ve also tried a bit: There and in google images, I didn’t find any straightforwardly accessible graphics files to plunder
An alternative would be to add a mouseMoved listener and draw manually a little to the right of the cursor (on the parent, I suppose, to avoid clipping at the borders?) but I was a bit concerned about overhead, and in initial explorations, this was looking very complicated. I’d take other suggestions about finding or making a nice help cursor as well. (The hand is the best built-in, but it doesn’t say “help” as clearly as a question-mark.)
I’m not sure this is the best solution in your case, because a good built-in mouse cursor should be the best. Anyway you can use mouse listeners and draw on a glasspane according to the mouse position. Here’s a glasspane drawing example.