GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 690997
block cursor may hide character behind it
Last modified: 2013-01-18 11:14:54 UTC
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! 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!
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.
Thank you for the tip. I would not have guessed that from the function description. I seem to get confused between what is the background, and what is the foreground :-).
BTW, I will close this ticket for now.