Bigger X11 Cursors suitable for 4k screens

One way to do it is to replace the standard font files of X that contain the cursor shapes with larger versions. For this, get the font source file cursor.bdf, enlarge it with bdfresize, and then either manually configure applications/the WM/the root window to use this font, or replace the old font files.

For details, see e.g. here.

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In fvwm, you can also use CursorStyle to set up the desired font glyphs or even images. I haven't tried this, but I think this won't work with X applications that change the cursor themselves.

Although the recipe provided by dirkt does work, the resulting scaled bitmap cursors look ugly. There is a way to make X use the Type 1 cursor font instead, rescaling it appropriately.

The default X cursor font exists both as a bitmap font (file cursor.pcf.gz) and as a Type 1 font (file cursor.pfa). The recipe provided below makes the bitmap font unavailable to the system and turns the font name cursor into an alias for the appropriately rescaled Type 1 font (via the fonts.alias file).

1. Uninstall the package that contains the file /usr/share/fonts/misc/cursor.pcf.gz (could be named cursor-misc, fonts-misc, or something similar), or simply delete this file and disable upgrades to this package, so that this bitmap font is unavailable to the X server. Run mkfontdir /usr/share/fonts/misc to remove the bitmap font from the font directory.

2. Make sure that the package that contains the file /usr/share/fonts/Type1/cursor.pfa (could be named xfree86-type1, fonts-type1, or something similar) is installed.

3. Create the file /usr/share/fonts/Type1/fonts.alias with the following contents, adjusting 801 to the desired cursor size.

   cursor -xfree86-cursor-medium-r-normal--0-801-0-0-p-0-adobe-fontspecific
   

4. Run fc-cache -r and xset fp rehash to make the Type 1 font available to the system.

Have a look at http://gnome-look.org and find a cursor that has 48x48 or 64x64 pixels. Edit .Xresources

Xcursor.theme: Name
Xcursor.size: Size

extract the cursor archive to ~/.icons/.

Then run xrdb -load .Xresources but maybe a restart of X is required to complete. Depends on your WM.