In reverse video, cursor can disappear

[treyharris]

Granted this probably isn't exactly a common occurrence, but while I have my terminals set to Solarized (Dark), I set my editor to Solarized Light to easily distinguish it and because it's a bit easier on my eyes for longer coding sessions.

Unfortunately, because the Blink cursor color is the same as the foreground text, that means it totally disappears. Observe, first with the cursor on line 2, column 1 of the file (from a terminal perspective, line 3 col 0, the opening brace in {-# LANGUAGE...)—it's very distinctive here because Emacs has highlighted it (along with the matching closing brace, which is not where the cursor is) for application-specific reasons:

Now, I move down one line, to terminal line 4 col 0, at the beginning of module CC where:

and, moving the cursor right by characters:

You can just make out the location of the cursor because of the desaturation of the character underneath it, but it's nearly impossible to see on an iPad Pro (especially in night shift color rendering) and is totally invisible when the cursor is not over a text character.

Based on what other terminal emulators do, I'd suggest either a "smart cursor" coloring that adapts to what's behind it (many shift to an outline when the cursor is within a solid multiline area of saturated color, or do a colorwheel calculation to dynamically find an appropriate color that's equidistant from foreground and background), or at least a change such that the cursor color cannot be exactly the value of any of the defined theme colors, since it's always possible that you'll be in a solid multiline block of that color.

If you want something that's static in the theme but doesn't add an additional storage slot to the theme, perhaps a simple color shift algorithm to start with the foreground color and if it's light, darken by 5%, if dark, lighten by 5%, while avoiding other colors defined in the theme. But I'm just spitballing here; I just wanted to make you aware of the issue, as it's a usability showstopper for me—I know most folks don't use lots of colors in TTY mode, but I do. Thanks!

[carloscabanero]

I will check how something similar to iTerm would be.

Also, if we provided configuration for the cursor color, would that help you atm?

[treyharris]

Also, if we provided configuration for the cursor color, would that help you atm?

Sure, but unless I've missed something, right now you can't configure any colors except for selecting from one of the themes, correct? It would be odd to have a color picker just for cursor color, wouldn't it?

[goerz]

Not that weird. iTerm has it (see screenshot below)

I actually would love to see the same options in Blink

[treyharris]

@goerz Sure, but you can use the color picker on any of the color swatches in iTerm2. What I was saying seemed "weird" was being able to change just the cursor color without being able to change all the theme's colors (or at least foreground and background).

[carloscabanero]

We currently have (although it is disabled in the app) themes as JS files, with the possibility to upload yours from any URL. The theme can change pretty much anything that is in there, including cursor blink. Exposing all these options through an interface could work, but I think I have never used any of those menus. And I would prefer to have a simple "file editor" for this type of configurations.

I think enabling "Add your theme/font" and then implementing some type of "Smart Cursor" as suggested initially might be the way to go. I will enable the theme/font selection on the next raw version for testers.

[xinan]

Off topic here. I am also using Solarized Light, but the color (same as yours) looks different from what I used to get from desktop. Why is it so and is there a way to fix it?

[carloscabanero]

If you use iTerm, they have a mode that modifies the colors to "improve" contrast in themes.

[xinan]

What mode is that? I think the problem is not just the contrast but the color. See screenshot:

And I get the same color as the first screenshot in Blink. Is there a way to make it look like the second one or the third one?

[carloscabanero]

@xinan You can now define your own custom fonts & themes and adjust the color through an external file. Check out https://github.com/blinksh/themes

@treyharris I will update the Solarized theme with a Dark Magenta cursor as shown in #33 as a hot fix.

I would like to take it a step further and make them editable too, with a similar dialog to the one shown by @goerz. I think I finally know how this should work and we can definitely nail it :)

[xinan]

Thanks! Would there be the Light version of Solarized too?

[carloscabanero]

The idea is that you can upload your own, and the bundled ones are just a nice sample. Not planning to add more there for now (although maybe another light one makes sense).