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block cursor may hide character behind it
Status:
RESOLVED: FIXED
Product:
Xfce4-terminal
Component:
General

Comments

Description Joel Brobecker 2012-10-03 18:12:46 CEST
This is an enhancement suggestion regarding the behavior of the block cursor.

If the cursor color is close to some of the colors used in the Palette, moving the cursor over one of the characters using these close colors will make it hard to read the character under it. (for instance, my cursor is red, and my palette includes a couple of purples).

The way good old xterm handles the situation is by displaying the character not in the original color, but in the background color.  For instance, if the terminal background is black, then moving the red cursor over a character causes it to be displayed in black over a red block.

The obvious workaround is to either use a different type of cursor, or to somehow find a cursor color that would work well with the palette. But I can't seem to find something that works with all 16 colors of the palette!

Thank you :-)
Comment 1 Joel Brobecker 2012-10-03 18:14:22 CEST
PS: If building the terminal from sources isn't too difficult (configure script, not too many dependencies), I could possibly take a look and propose a patch, provided the idea of the enhancement is accepted!
Comment 2 Nick Schermer editbugs 2012-10-03 18:58:22 CEST
This issue need to be resolved in vte (the console widget we use).
Comment 3 Joel Brobecker 2013-01-02 13:09:47 CET
Thanks for the feedback. For the record, I reported the issue in the gnome-terminal bugzilla (I think they maintain the widget in question):

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=690997
Comment 4 Joel Brobecker 2013-01-18 12:11:39 CET
Here is the answer from the VTE team:
-- 

> VTE already supports this: vte_terminal_set_color_cursor(terminal, NULL)
> selects the xterm style behavior.  See 
> http://developer.gnome.org/vte/unstable/VteTerminal.html#vte-terminal-set-color-cursor
>
> I don't know about gnome-terminal, but roxterm supports this if you leave "set
> cursor colour" unselected in the color scheme preferences.

I checked the gnome-terminal, and indeed, and the cursor seems to be working
that way. Something interesting that I just noticed as well: When the terminal
loses focus, the cursor becomes a "hollow" rectangle (as expected to show that
focus has been lost), but then the character under it is displayed in the
original colour.

Thank you :).
Comment 6 Joel Brobecker 2016-07-15 22:24:01 CEST
Thanks a lot!

Bug #9348

Reported by:
Joel Brobecker
Reported on: 2012-10-03
Last modified on: 2016-07-15

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