Fix Missing Cursors in Sway on NixOS
Sorry, not the editor Cursor…
When I moved from GNOME Desktop to Sway on my NixOS machine I noticed that my cursor was missing in LibreWolf (Firefox with more privacy). This wasn’t an issue on GNOME, which I previously used.
I searched the internet a little, but didn’t find anything covering Sway, NixOS and missing cursors.
I tested which cursors were missing using MDN CSS Cursor and realized that a lot of them were missing.
I like the default cursors on GNOME, so I found out that they were called Adwaita
.
Solution
To ensure that those cursors were available I added the following to my nix configuration.
programs.sway = {
enable = true;
wrapperFeatures.gtk = true;
extraPackages = with pkgs; [
adwaita-icon-theme
# I have more packages here, but I omitted them for brevity
];
};
Then I configured sway using
seat seat0 xcursor_theme Adwaita 24
After reloading sway (or signing out and then in again) the issue was solved.
Metadata
$ sway --version
sway version 1.10.1
NixOS 25.05