VGA-softcursor.txt

Software cursor for VGA    by Pavel Machek <[email protected]>
=======================    and Martin Mares <[email protected]>

   Linux now has some ability to manipulate cursor appearance. Normally, you
can set the size of hardware cursor (and also work around some ugly bugs in
those miserable Trident cards--see #define TRIDENT_GLITCH in drivers/video/
vgacon.c). You can now play a few new tricks:  you can make your cursor look
like a non-blinking red block, make it inverse background of the character it's
over or to highlight that character and still choose whether the original
hardware cursor should remain visible or not.  There may be other things I have
never thought of.

   The cursor appearance is controlled by a "<ESC>[?1;2;3c" escape sequence
where 1, 2 and 3 are parameters described below. If you omit any of them,
they will default to zeroes.

   Parameter 1 specifies cursor size (0=default, 1=invisible, 2=underline, ...,
8=full block) + 16 if you want the software cursor to be applied + 32 if you
want to always change the background color + 64 if you dislike having the
background the same as the foreground.  Highlights are ignored for the last two
flags.

   The second parameter selects character attribute bits you want to change
(by simply XORing them with the value of this parameter). On standard VGA,
the high four bits specify background and the low four the foreground. In both
groups, low three bits set color (as in normal color codes used by the console)
and the most significant one turns on highlight (or sometimes blinking--it
depends on the configuration of your VGA).

   The third parameter consists of character attribute bits you want to set.
Bit setting takes place before bit toggling, so you can simply clear a bit by 
including it in both the set mask and the toggle mask.

Examples:
=========

To get normal blinking underline, use: echo -e '\033[?2c'
To get blinking block, use:            echo -e '\033[?6c'
To get red non-blinking block, use:    echo -e '\033[?17;0;64c'