From: mark@taylor.uucp (Mark A. Davis)
Subject: Re: Blinking Cursor in Xterm???
Organization: Lake Taylor Hospital Computer Services
Lines: 38

me@dude.pcs.com (Michael Elbel) writes:

>In <1993May16.213936.6904@wariat.org> allbery@wariat.org (allbery) writes:

>>As quoted from <1993May13.212321.2563@moepi.do.open.de> by bernward@moepi.do.open.de (Bernward Averwald):
>>+---------------
>>> Back in the days of X11.1 I did analyse the xterm code. The cursor 
>>> was implemented by drawing a rectangle around the character. I doesn't
>>> seem to be changed 'til now.
>>> But if you have the sources you could add a blinking cursor via
>>> XtAppAddTimeOut or similar :-|.

>>The server overhead for this is mildly ridiculous, though (see also DESQview/X,
>>which does this in its DOS windows).  Do you really want xterm to wake up every
>>half second and whack the server into doing a bitblt?

>So what? I'm running emu on a 25 MHz 68020 box. I cannot make out ANY
>difference in performance whether the cursor is set to blinking or
>not (If you think about it a bit, a cycle of 400 ms is a hell a lot of
>time for even the slowest PC). Since you would of course only enable
>the blinking text cursor when your xterm has the input focus, this 
>application is active anyway. To repeat it, a blinking text cursor
>costs almost nothing in performance, it just needs some thought when
>designing the xterm software.

You are stuck in a distributed system feedback loop!  What if you are on an
Xterminal or running xterm over the net to another machine?  That is when the
load problems occur.  If you had a machine with 20 Xterminals attached and
they all had blinking cursors in xterm's, this could represent a considerable
ethernet bandwidth waste.

I'm not picking on you, just people keep forgetting that there is a lot of life
out there besides distributed or singleuser "Workstations"!
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