Why is it called hand.* when it's a cross in a circle? And where is that even used?

Good question, and I don't know the answer. I think it might be the cursor for pan/zoom. Or maybe it is a fossil.

👍 I checked with tk and this does look much better

I did a quick look and I can not find any use of the hand icon (git grep hand[^l] returns only a few hits).

Looking at backend_tkagg the file 'move' has been used for panning as far back as the git history goes (shows up in e34a333) but the comments at https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/blob/master/lib/matplotlib/backend_bases.py#L2795 imply that hand used to used for panning. That comment also (with minor formatting changes) goes back to e34a333 .

99% sure that the whole hand set is a fossil that we can safely remove. There might be some third-party backends out there that use it?

I am in favor of merging this as-is and dealing with removing hand later.

Do we want to put in an API note for removing the xpm and ppm files?

I see those files as internal implementation details, not API; they were never intended for use outside matplotlib.

I see those files as internal implementation details, not API; they were never intended for use outside matplotlib, as far as I know.