GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 529304
Strange Artifacts -- Expanded Cursor
Last modified: 2008-11-29 05:57:31 UTC
In gnome-terminal I frequently get something like an expanded cursor. Still investigating on more details. However, this seems to be true if the char under the cursor (in emacs) happens to be a tab. The cursor the spans the entire tab. It does not show this behavior always, though, as observed in files with multiple consecutive lines indented by tab. vte 0.16.13
OK, this is strange. But I just managed to get some nice data points reproducing this. While creating the testing file, I got the following behavior. Full text below, spanning tabs marked by underscores. 2008-04-23 Karsten Bräckelmann <guenther@example.net> * ChangeLog: Self contained two-line debug comment to reproduce ________bug 529304. ________ The indentation of course are real tabs in the original. I got 8 chars spanning cursors in the second line of the comment, and the line after the comment. The latter actually is an entirely empty line, only consisting of an newline (yup, additional trailing newline in the file ;). I then did 'head ChangeLog' in another terminal, and copy-n-pasted the 2 lines of comment (entire lines, not selecting text only) back into the ChangeLog in emacs. * If the cursor is in the line right before an existing comment at the time of middle mouse-click pasting, the all seems to be fine. * If I insert another blank line before the existing comment, thus having the cursor in the line where a comment could go, with a blank line between the cursor and the existing command -- and then paste, it breaks. In this case, similar to the above example, the cursor spans the tab in the second line of the command. This seems to be reliably reproducible.
Next one. This time, I copy-n-paste the 'head' output from above into gedit first. This results in visibly the same, however, in gedit the lines are indented by 8 chars. Mark the entire 2 lines in gedit with the mouse, paste into emacs in gnome-terminal like before. The pasted and visual results are rather irritating. The first line is indented by 8 spaces. No visual oddities here. The second line is indented by a tab (inserted by emacs automatically), followed by 8 spaces. This is not unusual. The visual artifacts are, though. :) In the second line, *both* the leading tab as well as the 8 spaces do show the spanning cursor artifacts. I get an 8 char width blinking cursor, when the cursor is at the position of the tab, x offset 0. I *also* get an 8 char width cursor, when the cursor is on any of the 8 spaces. The cursor spans the 8 spaces, regardless of the actual position (of the spaces) the cursor is at. This is most irritating, given that the cursor spans a couple spaces, instead of a single tab only. One can only guess where the cursor actually is... NOTE: The artifacts do *not* appear in my current testing, when I save the file and reopen it with emacs. While seeing such a spanning cursor, if I move the focus out of gnome-terminal, the spanning cursor is an outline only -- with some markup at x position 2, reading "NL" (tiny letters, N above L).
(In reply to comment #2) > NOTE: The artifacts do *not* appear in my current testing, when I save the > file and reopen it with emacs. While this was true, and reproducible during that testing... This is not always true. I have seen ChangeLog entries today, which, right after opening the file in emacs, showed this very artifact.
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 514632 ***