Location of the resource files for the spinning wait cursor?

Question

For a presentation I am making, I want to find my Mac's system's default "Spinning Wait Cursor" resources.

I was told that the cursors are in here: /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/HiServices.framework/Versions/A/Resources/cursors

and here: /System/Library/Frameworks/WebKit.framework/Versions/Current/Frameworks/WebCore.framework/Resources/

Indeed, one can find some large and vectorized versions of most cursors in the first folder, and some other, smaller ones in the second.

But, there seems to be no beach ball in there.

I know one can find the graphics in high resolution online easily, but for my project I would need to get the original system files.

A screenshot or animated screenshot also wouldn't be what I'm looking for. I couldn't find the info anywhere.

Note 1: From the GUI, a user can see the spinning wait cursor in various different sizes depending on the settings in System Preferences > Accessibility > Display > Cursor size, and then proceeding to crash their computer.

Note2: I am not trying to change my OS' appearance.

Can anyone help me find where the resource is? Is it hardcoded like the startup chime?

Answer 1

Cursors are rendered using CoreGraphics

The Wait Cursor or what is sometimes affectionately know as the "spinning beachball of death" is rendered in CoreGraphics (Apple's 2D rendering engine). Meaning, they are generated on the fly depending on what your preferences are set to (i.e. cursor size).

The CoreGraphics file is located at /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/CoreGraphics.framework/Versions/A/CoreGraphics

From my research I was able to find the parameters for the Wait Cursor: $23766C - $23D66C"

As far as working with images stored in CoreGraphics, I can point you to this tutorial: Core Graphics on OS X Tutorial

Static Images of Wait Cursor

There is a directory that has static images of the cursors:

/System/Library/Frameworks/GLUT.framework/Versions/A/Resources

Within that directory you will find a number of TIFF files. The specific file is waitCursor.tiff

Opening the file with preview (open waitCursor.tiff) yields the following graphic (it's quite small):

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How I located the file....

The El Capitan cusors link you provided had broken img src links, so I used the one for Yosemite for reference as they are pretty much the same. The icon you wanted is called the "Wait cursor."

So, using the find command in Terminal, I executed the following:

find /System -iname waitcursor*

The command basically says starting from the /System directory, look for all files with the name "waitCursor" in it regardless of case.

I guessed the format of the name from the file naming conventions in the directory you initially provided. For example, the "Resize Down" cursor was called "resizedown".

Answer 2

Here's the El Capitan spinning beachball from materialup.com

Answer 3

On macOS Catalina, they are stored as PDF files:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/HIServices.framework/Versions/A/Resources/cursors

Animated cursors are stored as static, vertical sprite sheets, that you need to manually convert to GIFs.

I extracted the cursors from CoreGraphics myself. You can download them here, as TIFF files.

UPDATE: I updated the Google Drive link to include all cursors in Big Sur.

Another answer here mentions /System/Library/Frameworks/GLUT.framework/Versions/A/Resource, which appears to be static images of cursors from NeXTSTEP, not macOS cursors, but close.