Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Cursory Look at Cursors

eno-writer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 23 posts

Re: A Cursory Look at Cursors

#2

Post by Joker_vD »

> It would be hard to imagine a program for editing text that doesn't have a cursor.

Ed is the standard text editor. It doesn't waste precious kilobytes on cursor positioning code.

Speaking seriously, this inherent need for the feedback from the user presentation layer back into the internals is why writing a decent multi-line editor with non-monospace fonts is such a nuisance.

Re: A Cursory Look at Cursors

#7

Post by [deleted] »

Joker_vD wrote: post #2

> It would be hard to imagine a program for editing text that doesn't have a cursor. Ed is the standard text editor. It doesn't waste precious kilobytes on cursor positioning code. Speaking seriously, this inherent need for the feedback from the user presentation layer back into the internals is why writing a decent multi-line editor with non-monospace fonts is such a nuisance.

[deleted]

Re: A Cursory Look at Cursors

#8

Post by amitp »

bloopernova wrote: post #3

What do people on HN use, and why? Box, underline, vertical bar? Flashing or not?

I use a solid box in a terminal and for coding, and a vertical bar for writing in emacs org-mode. But I recently tried out a one-third box[1] in emacs and I am really loving it! It's partway between a box and an underline. Some software has a half-box option but I don't think MacOS Terminal or iTerm2 have that. [Edit: I was wrong — iTerm2 has an advanced setting for "underline cursor width"]

I used to use flashing but have that turned off right now, for reasons I can't remember.

[1] (setq-local cursor-type '(hbar . 8))

Re: A Cursory Look at Cursors

#9

Post by netmare »

bloopernova wrote: post #3

What do people on HN use, and why? Box, underline, vertical bar? Flashing or not?

I still prefer it the way it was when I started using computers with DOS 6.x and Windows 3.1: underline in console, bar in GUIs, block in both with overwrite mode. Always blinking of course. My problems with modern programs are 1) overwrite mode is usually not implemented and 2) moving the cursor does not reset the blink timer. The first I can understand (although it's trivial to do), but the second results in the cursor getting invisible when moving while pressing the arrow keys. It's the little things...
Post reply on HN