On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 02:21:11AM -0500, Branden Robinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > tag 241717 + unreproducible moreinfo
Just BTW: there is no reason to tag this as unreproducible, as you haven't tried to reproduce it but dismissed it because you assumed the mouse cursor is wm-controlled. You might have tagged it as solved or notabug or something similar (wich would have been wrong, but at least consistent with your response :) > thanks > > > The xterm mouse cursor is a thin line, under debians xterm, it's much > > thicker. > > The *mouse* cursor is not controlled by xterm, but by another program, > probably your window manager. This is wrong. If you don't believe me please ask somebody who knows more about X. The mouse cursor is application controllable and apps usually make ample use of that. xterm sets it to the insert cursor (or whatever is configured for xterm), sets the colours etc. and even has escape codes to control this appearance. > > It seems that debians xterm does not set mouse cursor colours correctly > > and defaults to white background and black foreground, while the default > > config specifies black background on white foreground, which is probably > > why -rv fixes this as it correctly swaps background and foreground for all > > items. > > To be precise, the Debian default is "gray90" on "black". You can see > this in /etc/X11/app-defaults/XTerm-color. I was very imprecise with my use of "black" vs. "white" indeed, the point being more of dark-on-light bg vs. light on dark bg, or more precisely, using the same fg/bg colours for the mouse cursor as for the text. Nevertheless, the mousecursor is normally black-on-white (or black-on-gray90 if you like). Debian reverses the default colours for the text but leaves the mouse cursor colours black-on-white (or gray90) while correct colours are white-on-black (or gray90). You can see the correct behaviour and correct appearance by starting xterm without te debian colours (white bg), or another terminal emulator such as rxvt-xpm or Eterm or pterm or just about anything else (I haven't found any emulator that does it wrong with the exception of rxvt-unicode, which is an old version which has been corrected upstream). > Perhaps you could put a window dump of xterm up on the web somewhere so > we could have a look at this? > > What you're describing doesn't sound like Debian's defaults at all. Here is an example: http://data.plan9.de/x.png The lower right terminal contains a much lighter blue (blue is often used as a background colour). The other terminals show more-or-less standard vt100 colours, the xterm shows a much more difficult-to-read combination (for me). The program used is alsamixer, but many other programs use this bg colour by default (mutt, irssi, epic4 I think etc..) > It's also worth noting that Debian's default xterm configuration hasn't > changed recently. Perhaps something else on your system is playing > around with X resources? I am not using xterm normally, and am using my own .Xdefaults for 10years+, which is why I didn't notice the problem so far. While working on rxvt-unicode I had a bug that kept the terminal from settting mouse colours, which I fixed (in version 2.7 btw). My own rxvt* config also defaults to white-on-black (gray80, actually ;), while both rxvt and rxvt-unicode default to black-on-white just like xterm. However, the mouse cursor in rxvt-unicode wasn't adjusted properly (that code was broken and commented out). After fixing this I tried xterm with the debian default config for the first time (thus the HOME=/tmp/empty to ensure my .Xdefaults aren't picked up (they are not loaded into the x-server, either)). I then noticed both the hard-to-read colours (which are from /etc/X11/app-defaults/XTerm-color) as well as the same "bug" regarding the mouse cursor (unlike rxvt-unicode, it's not neccessarily a code bug but a config bug, although it could be assumed that xterm should use the configured fg/bg colours for the mouse cursor by default, as rxvt-unicode does. xterm does not do this and needs manual configuration to match the configured colours. The default black-on-white config is consistent, while debian reversed only part of the colours and left others unchanged, resulting in a white background colou for the mousecursor and black for the text, creating an outline version of whatever cursor used). As for a visual description of how the cursor in most terminal looks like, it should (by default, this is usualy configurable, and no colour cursors used) be a thin vertical line with thick endpoints (as you can see in most terminals), the same is true with xterm in it's default configuration. In debian, the insert cursor becomes very heavyweight because what's actually displayed is the outline of this cursor. It does not resemble the originally intended apearance. I assume that this is a just an oversight or a omission on part of the debian maintainer, nothing more, and not intended behaviour. The changed colours, OTOH, are obviously intended behaviour, but most combinations are much harder to read to me (I have a very common form of red-green blindness). The standard (vt100) colours are more-or-less standard among all terminal emulators (some might use not-quite-white for white, but the general brightness and look is extremely similar). Debians xterm (and only debains xterm AFAICS) changed at least one of these colours (maybe more). The problem is that programs assume the vt100 colour set and due to the drastically changed brightness (apart from appearance) of the changed colour(s), programs often output hard-to-read text on xterm while the same tetx looks readable everywhere else. In addition, this colour change *is* a bug as the manpage documents the colours clearly, but the displayed colours are not in according to the manpage. To resolve this, either the manpage needs to be updated to conform to the debian "standard", or (preferably as this is a usability issue), the colours should be set to the same set of colours that every other terminal displays, otherwise programs have no chance to use colours portably. -- -----==- | ----==-- _ | ---==---(_)__ __ ____ __ Marc Lehmann +-- --==---/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ / [EMAIL PROTECTED] |e| -=====/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\ XX11-RIPE --+ The choice of a GNU generation | |
