[HN Gopher] Blinking Cursor Turns 54
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Blinking Cursor Turns 54
Author : elvis70
Score : 45 points
Date : 2022-01-10 17:20 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hackaday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (hackaday.com)
| TonyRobbins wrote:
| Yes, but mostly because I accidentally killed my high school's
| only copy of MSDOS by using it and accidentally typed something
| into one of the config files that wasn't supposed to be there.
| Thankfully we had a contract with IBM who were based in our city
| at the time so it was semi-easy to get fixed.
| TonyRobbins wrote:
| Well, now there's Cricut!
|
| (Tongue in cheek)
| andrewcarter wrote:
| Reminds me of
| <https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swiftui/viewbuilde...>
| pseingatl wrote:
| I miss nbtsr (no blink terminate and stay resident). Wish there
| was something for modern OS's.
| rwallace wrote:
| Thankfully, you can turn off cursor blinking on Windows (by
| turning the blink rate down to zero).
| bokchoi wrote:
| The hackaday article doesn't add much. The actual article is:
| https://www.inverse.com/innovation/blinking-cursor-history
| csdvrx wrote:
| Interestingly enough, disabling cursor blinks on the intel 950
| iGPUs resulted in increased powersaving:
| https://lwn.net/Articles/317922/ and
| http://tuxdiary.com/2015/09/29/save-battery-intel-linux/
|
| A few years later, I checked that with powertop when I was using
| my thinkpad in uni and it was true and measurable!
|
| I'm not sure if it's still the case, but it's funny how UI
| features can tax the power budget in unsuspected ways.
| mbg721 wrote:
| Any idea what the processor cost of hitting "insert" and having
| the big rectangular cursor was?
| csdvrx wrote:
| The shape of the cursor isn't the problem - the fact that the
| shape regularly changes when blinking is.
| bitwize wrote:
| Remember when Visual Studio Code consumed 13% of one CPU core
| to blink the cursor?
| jpe90 wrote:
| "A blinking cursor can have a significant effect on battery
| life, as such we decided to change the default to non-
| blinking."
|
| Sublime Text 4 Update FAQ, May 2021
|
| https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/sublime-text-4-update-faq/58...
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Haha, that's probably an electron app. Or they use a really
| buggy UI framework. Otherwise, I wouldn't know why updating a
| 4x8 pixel block would cause a significant amount of power
| usage. Especially if a 286 could do it no problemo.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Sublime is a native C++ app. It uses a minimal custom
| framework built on top of I think skia which actually
| mediates the drawing on hardware devices (or the CPU). As
| described by the articles the power usage comes from
| causing the hardware to repeatedly exit a low wattage deep
| idle state to update the UI not to do with the amount of
| work required to render the update.
|
| This is actually more noticeable for efficient apps than
| inefficient/bloated apps as the latter don't get as many
| chances to enter deep idle states in the first place.
| jpe90 wrote:
| It's a native c++ app
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822114
| csdvrx wrote:
| The tone of your reply is inappropriate. Any apps that
| cause a change in the content displayed risk causing
| wakeups on the GPU.
|
| It's true whether it's a terminal emulator, a browser or an
| office suite.
|
| GPU power saving _loves_ static content (OLED screens don
| 't, but that's another story)
| newsbinator wrote:
| And moving your mouse around made Windows 95 faster!
|
| https://www.extremetech.com/computing/294907-why-moving-the-...
| chhickman wrote:
| You can still observe a related effect to this in Windows 10.
| Open up any large(ish) file in NotePad++ or most any other
| editor and place the cursor in the text and drag to the
| bottom of the screen so it starts scrolling. If you hold the
| mouse still at that point it will scroll through a couple
| dozen every half second or so, but if you wag the mouse side
| to side it will scroll through hundreds at a time in the same
| span.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| every time I use this trick, I think of how running
| diagonally in some games is faster than running in one
| direction...
| badRNG wrote:
| I think that's just because those games are written
| poorly and don't account for the differences in moving
| diagonally. If you are moving on a grid, moving forward
| one tile moves you the length of a tile. Moving
| diagonally one tile moves you sqrt(2) ~1.4 tile lengths.
| adamrezich wrote:
| always normalize your input vectors!
| munificent wrote:
| I always assume that it's because the apps simply scroll on
| both timer events and mouse move events. Wiggle the mouse
| to raise a bunch of mouse move events and you get faster
| scrolling.
| franga2000 wrote:
| Yeah people always look at me like I'm crazy when I do
| that, but it really does work
| reaperducer wrote:
| _And moving your mouse around made Windows 95 faster!_
|
| Still the case with macOS in Finder. Even on Big Sur running
| on an M1. I dealt with this over the weekend.
| bitwize wrote:
| Good old blinking cursors, one of those computing things that are
| almost invisible until they're missing.
|
| The MAME emulation of the Tandy 2000 is reasonably complete. I
| get the feeling that it was barely worked on until Windows 1.0
| for the 2000 turned up, then there was a flurry of activity to
| get that working. The reason is because while the system is
| _mostly_ emulated, one critical component is not: the display
| board 's support for a hardware blinking cursor. As a result, if
| you're navigating a word processing document in, say, WordStar,
| you're largely doing so blind. Only programs with a soft cursor
| (like GW-BASIC in graphic mode) work like they should.
| odiroot wrote:
| If you also dislike this: https://jurta.org/en/prog/noblink
| tpmx wrote:
| I've been using Emacs since 1996. One of the many reasons I like
| it is the default non-blinking full block cursor. It brings a
| certain calmness to the editing process. No stress or
| distraction. It feels so clean.
|
| It's interesting how very subtle design decisions like these
| matter so much.
| a_e_k wrote:
| Emacs has a lot of cool little touches to the way it blinks the
| cursor.
|
| blink-cursor-delay (defaults to 0.5 seconds): Keeps the cursor
| visible and not blinking when you're rapidly navigating around
| or typing. Most other apps seem to do this sort of thing too,
| but it's an easy detail to overlook.
|
| blink-cursor-blinks (defaults to 10): Blinks the cursor a
| certain number of times and then _stops_ blinking.
|
| One way I do customize it is to set blink-cursor-alist to '((t
| . hollow)). When the cursor blinks it alternates between a full
| block and the outline of a block so that it never disappears
| completely.
| Teckla wrote:
| I prefer a blinking cursor, otherwise I often find it hard to
| find the cursor on the screen.
|
| Also prefer block cursor to underline cursor for the same
| reason.
| csdvrx wrote:
| On Windows Terminal and others, I think you can use a non
| standard color (example: red, pink...) which should help you
| easily locate it.
| morelisp wrote:
| Emacs does blink by default. On the other hand, it is the only
| piece of software I know with `blink-cursor-blinks` - which is
| I think 10 by default, I've reduced it to 3 - so the cursor
| blinks only a couple times and then stops.
| [deleted]
| anon_123g987 wrote:
| Blinking can be disabled in RStudio, too, though it's not the
| default. I know this because RStudio doesn't respect my XFCE
| settings, where blinking can also be disabled, or the blinking-
| rate set (almost) OS-wide.
| dang wrote:
| Is that the default? The cursor in my Emacs blinks and I don't
| believe I told it to.
|
| Edit: M-x blink-cursor-mode FTW - thanks!
| tpmx wrote:
| Uh, please clarify? :)
|
| I do believe it is the default. Hard to know what's default
| when you've been carrying over your .emacs for two decades.
|
| Every single fresh install on random throwaway installs I've
| done has defaulted to a single non-blinking block cursor
| though.
| gmfawcett wrote:
| It's easy -- just run "emacs -q" to bypass all your local
| config. Default in GUI is a blinking cursor. (Default in
| terminal is the terminal's own blink default.)
| tpmx wrote:
| > Default in GUI is a blinking cursor. (Default in
| terminal is the terminal's own blink default.)
|
| Ah, that probably explains my confusion.
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