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