...to draw a grey drop-shadow on some of the cursors? I know some NVIDIA cards alpha-blend cursors, but for the rest of us would it be possible to just fake the shadow with a smudgy grey outline on the botton and right sides of the cursor?

Nope, that's only possible when the translucent window extension for XFree will be available because you'll need to be able to alphablend the dropshadow with the contents of the framebuffer.

And currently it isn't possible (AFAIK) to have (per pixel) alpha values for any window in X. :(

(please correct me if I'm wrong)

Reread my original post. I know we can't do that yet. That's not what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is FAKING IT by drawing something that simulates a shadow onto the cursor itself, ie, it's part of the cursor image.

Take, for example, the standard white arrow cursor. It has a black border all the way around it. Now make the right and botton borders a little bit thicker and color them grey. A simulated shadow if you wull.

No blending or anything else like that, nothing whatsoever to do with XRender. If you can draw cursors in all shapes and sizes as we do already, you can do this. It won't look like the blending found with the hardware accelerated stuff. It will look like a regular cursor with a drawn-in dropshadow (ie, like handind drawing "3D" letters on a piece of paper - a part of the image itself).

..but I wasn't talking about XRender either ;)

AFAIK you can only use black and white, no colors, no grays.

Well, poo poo. :o(