1Software cursor for VGA 2======================= 3 4by Pavel Machek <pavel@atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz> 5and Martin Mares <mj@atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz> 6 7Linux now has some ability to manipulate cursor appearance. Normally, you 8can set the size of hardware cursor (and also work around some ugly bugs in 9those miserable Trident cards [#f1]_. You can now play a few new tricks: 10you can make your cursor look 11 12like a non-blinking red block, make it inverse background of the character it's 13over or to highlight that character and still choose whether the original 14hardware cursor should remain visible or not. There may be other things I have 15never thought of. 16 17The cursor appearance is controlled by a ``<ESC>[?1;2;3c`` escape sequence 18where 1, 2 and 3 are parameters described below. If you omit any of them, 19they will default to zeroes. 20 21first Parameter 22 specifies cursor size:: 23 24 0=default 25 1=invisible 26 2=underline, 27 ... 28 8=full block 29 + 16 if you want the software cursor to be applied 30 + 32 if you want to always change the background color 31 + 64 if you dislike having the background the same as the 32 foreground. 33 34 Highlights are ignored for the last two flags. 35 36second parameter 37 selects character attribute bits you want to change 38 (by simply XORing them with the value of this parameter). On standard 39 VGA, the high four bits specify background and the low four the 40 foreground. In both groups, low three bits set color (as in normal 41 color codes used by the console) and the most significant one turns 42 on highlight (or sometimes blinking -- it depends on the configuration 43 of your VGA). 44 45third parameter 46 consists of character attribute bits you want to set. 47 48 Bit setting takes place before bit toggling, so you can simply clear a 49 bit by including it in both the set mask and the toggle mask. 50 51.. [#f1] see ``#define TRIDENT_GLITCH`` in ``drivers/video/vgacon.c``. 52 53Examples 54-------- 55 56To get normal blinking underline, use:: 57 58 echo -e '\033[?2c' 59 60To get blinking block, use:: 61 62 echo -e '\033[?6c' 63 64To get red non-blinking block, use:: 65 66 echo -e '\033[?17;0;64c' 67