The short version is that I've turned the brightness way down on my monitor and now I'm having problems finding the mouse cursor in eclipse (the text cursor). When it's a pointer cursor it's fine, but when it goes to the text cursor I can barely see it. Half the time I'm guessing where it is.
To be quite honest this is for all of Windows, but it's really a problem for me in eclipse where I spend a lot of time.
Update: I have looked at the windows settings, specifically the "Text Select" under "Pointers", but I'm not sure what to replace it with. I don't know anything about the .cur file it requires.
I am not sitting at a Windows box right now, so I can't try, but you can set the mouse cursor in the system settings / mouse settings. You can set specific cursors, like the text cursor. Windows ships (at least: shipped) with cursor themes that are much better visible. The same problem can occur when you need the "precision select" cursor - a small negative cross, invisible on grey background. But there are replacements with strong contours that are easily visible. So you don't have to change the whole pointer theme, if you don't want to, but can change just this one or two problematic.
I did this when using Windows XP, I hope it still is valid for 7.
Related
there is this annoying behavior in emacs which I don't know how to get rid of it.
lets say the current cursor position is on line 10 column 15.
now I need to quickly look up something far down the same buffer, I scroll down to that location and as I scroll down (or up) the cursor keeps moving and it loses its original location.
many people suggest to set a marker before scrolling but that is not a good solution, because you have to be always mindful of this fact before scrolling (which is impossible)
I know there should be a simple solution but I have not found it yet.
I'll appreciate your suggestions
As far as I know, Emacs doesn't allow you to scroll in such a way that your point disappears. I just took a quick look at xdisp.c and it looks like this is a fundamental assumption in the C code. This is different from some more recent editors (Sublime Text, VSCode etc).
However, the "many people" you mention actually have a reasonable point. If you're moving through the file by searching (C-s the-thing-im-looking-for) then Emacs will set a marker for you automatically.
I guess you could try adding a hook that set a marker at point whenever you scrolled? It wouldn't be trivial because you'd have to cope with things like not setting a load of markers through the file as your scroll dragged the cursor down. But my recommendation is probably to alter your workflow to match how Emacs wants to do things. In this case, it's probably a better approach than the modern editors it sounds like you're used to.
An option that might or might not be useful is scroll-preserve-screen-position. The description is somewhat hard to understand, but a net result is that if you mainly scroll using C-v/M-v, the point will visually stay at the same place on the screen (so if you do e.g. C-v C-v M-v M-v, the point will come back to its original position.
However, note that many commands do push a mark before they jump: isearch, end-of-buffer, imenu, xref-find-definition ... In all those cases, you can then press C-u C-SPC (the same command that you use to set the mark but called with a prefix argument) to pop the mark (concretely, jump to the last mark). If you need to jump back more than once, you can set the variable set-mark-command-repeat-pop to t, so that you only need to do C-u once and then repeatedly press C-SPC to pop more and more marks from the mark ring.
In general, there are better ways to navigate a buffer than scrolling in the wild; the cases where you do need to scroll, starting from "your current" point are (or should/could be ...) sufficiently rare that you know beforehand that you will be spending a possibly long time "looking around" in the buffer. It is then quite fast to set a mark, do your stuff somewhere else, and C-u <mash C-SPC as often as needed> until you get back to your initial point.
Looking for a way to control text/cursor highlighting colors when in vi-mode in tmux. I can not seem to find many answers from googling around. I love tmux and use this feature quite a bit, and I have been living with this flaw for some time and still have not been able to find a solution. You can view my dotfiles here. Keep in mind that my master branch is my OSX setup, and I have an "arch" branch for my Arch linux setup. The issues occurs on both systems. Though the colors are slightly different, but not by much.
Here is current symptoms: (both systems) I am in a tmux session, I want to enter into vi-mode for either searching or copying some text. When copying text (hitting v while in vi-mode for visual) the highlighted text and background are both black. So I can't see the text I am highlighting. Or while searching (hit "/" while in vi-mode for searching) my background and text on the entire line where my prompt is for typing the text I want to search is all black. So I have no idea what text is actually in the search. If I mis-type something due to fat fingers and nothing returns in my search, it can be frustrating. One last symptom (which is a minor one, but would be nice to solve) When I do search, I get absolutely no highlighting over than my normal cursor. Not like my vim set up where it highlights currently found, and all other matches.
Here is what the desired fix would look like: Searches would highlight in some shade of yellow or orange on all matched text. Searching prompt to type in search text would be at least readable. Anything but Black on Black. Highlighting text while selecting what to copy in visual mode again anything readable, no Black on Black.
Other things to note: I typically have mouse-mode on in tmux to promote keyboard-driven approach and not allow any selection of text via mouse selection. But when I do toggle this feature off and can then select text via mouse, the highlighted text background is white and text is black. While readable, would still wish to know how to control this color as well. Also (not sure any vim settings actually carry over to tmux) but everything works as desired while actually in vim. Just in case vim settings here. Same note about branches.
Most of my tools are latest versions afaik. This includes Tmux 2.1. I do not have full list of versions of my tools as of right now. If this may play a part in debugging let me know and I'll reply with versions. For what its worth other tools that might be in conflict is my shell I use zsh with on-my-zsh. On my mac I am using iTerm2, on arch I'm using URxvt. Doubt any of my .Xresources matter since it also happens on OSX.
Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
I use OSX and prefer a dark BG and light text in my terminal. A problem is that the mouse pointer is almost invisible. Its the I shaped pointer, its black with an extremely faint white glow. I often can't see where the pointer is.
If the terminal does not have focus and I'm hovering the mouse pointer over the terminal window I can see it fine. But once the terminal has focus the pointer practically disappears.
Please note, I'm asking about the mouse pointer not the terminal keyboard cursor, which is easily customisable.
Holding down the alt key on Mac OSX changes the cursor to a black cross that has a white border which makes it far easier to spot than the default text bar.
A better term to look for is "mouse pointer". Here are some places where it has been discussed:
Change default mouse cursor on OSX Mavericks
Can I make the mouse hairpin in the terminal more visible?
Terminal app mouse-pointer invisible
More than one solution is suggested, including add-ons (which you may or may not find useful).
Following the links in Thomas Dickey's answer, I saw many references to iTerm2.
While this won't be the solution for everyone, it's definitely worth a try - GPL2, easy to install and configure.
Out of the box, no contrast issues with the text cursor or mouse pointer against a black background. I just adjusted font size and switched on window borders.
I think the title is essentially self-explanatory except for a necessary clarification and caveat:
Clarification
I'm not entirely sure if 'narrowing' is the universal term for the feature I'm referring to. What I mean is something like Emacs' 'narrow buffer', ie. the ability to select a region and quickly narrow the editor window to show only that region, and then after some edits to be able to quickly zoom out to see/edit the full file again. It's a feature I like, and find far more useful than code folding.
Caveat
Of course the answer is 'yes -- (X)Emacs' (and possibly vim?). But I'm looking for something other than vim or Emacs; almost certainly a more GUIsh one (think Textmate, TextWrangler etc).
My researches seem to suggest that the straightest answer is just 'no'. I haven't been able to find an editor that runs on OS X that supports narrowing, other than emacs.
I have however figured out a workaround that might be of interest for some scenarios, which is to use Hog Bay Software's QuickCursor in conjunction with one or more editors.
For example, I've tried setting up QuickCursor to fire up TextMate. So now when working in XCode, I can select the text I want to narrow to, hit the global hotkey I have set up, and the selected text pops up in a TextMate window. That can be edited, then a save and dismiss window pops the edited text back in XCode.
This also works if you're just working in TextMate (or, I imagine, one of the other editors that QuickCursor can control); ie. you can select select test in the editor, trigger QuickCursor to open the selected text in a new window, and later pop that text back to the original window.
I'm guessing this is not what you want, but you didn't specifically say so: Aquamacs? It's an emacsen with good integration with OS X (cut, paste, menus, toolbars, etc).
Okay, I'll bite.
I've got really pleasant code/window colors set up in Xcode. Ordinarily, my selection color is very visible.
When I am doing a project search and iterating through the results, however, the results list stays in focus and the found text remains out of focus, using a different background color. This color is extremely hard to detect, especially when the text is embedded in a larger code block and the view is shifting around as it scrolls to the results.
Here's an example:
Left side is in focus (just normal selection), right side is out of focus (during project find)
Often it takes a few seconds to find where the heck the selected text is.
Unless I'm just missing it, Xcode seems to offer no way to change this particular selection color. Interestingly, it also doesn't seem to follow the selection color from the Appearance panel.
Does anyone know a way to change this color or force it to be more visible, short of changing my entire color scheme around?
Use this Xcode plugin:
http://github.com/tjw/XcodeSelectionColorFix
Instructions for using it are here: http://github.com/tjw/XcodeSelectionColorFix/blob/master/README.markdown
You can manually edit the theme file, which might allow a different selection color. If I recall (not on my dev machine), personal themes are in ~/Library/Application Support/Xcode/(should be intuitive from here/can't remember)
You can edit them in Property List Editor, if I remember right. The Xcode preferences don't expose all of the options available in the theme file.