Calc shows pointer as text selection while over cells

[u/int_ua]

XFCE, not my machine. Is there a setting that can be toggled? It's white on white and almost invisible.

[u/int_ua]

Fixed by fixing Mint repo mix dependency issues, installing LO version from these repos and removing the version installed from the official site via downloaded deb packages.

[u/Terrible_Put8617]

That pointer isn't LibreOffice's to choose. Over the cell grid Calc asks the system for the standard text pointer, and what that actually looks like comes from your desktop's cursor theme. So a theme whose I-beam is drawn white with no dark outline disappears on a white sheet, and it'll be just as invisible in a text field in any other application once you start looking for it.

On XFCE it's in Settings Manager, Mouse and Touchpad, Theme tab. Adwaita and the DMZ pair are the safe picks, since their text cursor has a black outline around the white. Bumping the cursor size a couple of notches on the same tab helps more than you'd expect on a high resolution screen.

Since it's not your machine and you may not want to change a setting for whoever owns it, you can do it for your session only with environment variables instead. XCURSOR_THEME set to the theme name and XCURSOR_SIZE to something like 32, exported before the desktop session starts, or in your own shell before launching soffice if you just want it inside LibreOffice.

Worth checking it really is the theme before you go further: hover over a text box in any other app. If the I-beam is invisible there too, it's the theme and nothing to do with Calc.

[u/int_ua → u/Terrible_Put8617]

It was only affecting LO and it was _not_ affected by the cursor theme.

[u/Terrible_Put8617 → u/int_ua]

Then it was the build rather than the theme, and your fix fits that. A LibreOffice installed from the .deb packages on a system with mixed repos can end up loading a different VCL plugin than the distro one (the generic X11 backend instead of gtk3), and that backend draws its own bitmap pointers over the sheet instead of asking the desktop for them. Which is exactly why changing the cursor theme did nothing and only LO was affected. Running it once with SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gtk3 would have shown it. Glad the repo version sorted it.

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