Feature: Cursor support

[willprice]

I'd love to see cursor support in kmscon. I see it's listed in the TODO list, and so I thought I'd open an issue to see what the support is like at the moment.

Cheers for creating such an excellent project.

[dvdhrm]

Thanks for the feedback. Cursor support is still somewhere low on the TODO list, but any contributions are welcome! I will work on kernel DRM core until late September, so I won't have much time to implement it until then. But starting with October I will tackle kmscon again.

[X4]

+1
cool, I think that there are more important features than the cursor support, but cursor support would nonetheless really helpful. For instance, (de-)increasing the font-size with common keyboard shortcuts and better anti-aliasing support. What's a little annoying is that scrolling in htop, leaves some weird lines.

[dvdhrm]

Font-resizing is already implemented in kmscon-8. Anti-aliasing support is based on freetype, thus, I doubt there's any better alternative. But I'm always open for suggestions. Scrolling in htop should work just fine with any recent kmscon binary. Please report these bugs if it doesn't. "Leaves some weird lines" is a bit too unspecific, sorry.

[X4]

@dvdhrm I wanted to take a screenshot, but that didn't work on tty2. How else can I take a screenshot?
After a refresh in htop, the last updated line is underlined and that's not something that's configured to be like that.

[dvdhrm]

You cannot take screenshots on plain DRM applications. You can try out wlterm, it uses the same underlying terminal emulation but as a GTK app. If you see the same problems with wlterm, I can fix it for kmscon, too:
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/kmscon/wlterm/

[X4]

@dvdhrm is it possible to add screenshot capability, or is that too complicated or too out of scope?
hmm, wlterm isn't in any of my gentoo overlays and I have plenty including sunrise (alpha/beta stuff).

[dvdhrm]

git clone git://people.freedesktop.org/~dvdhrm/wlterm
cd wlterm
make
./wlterm

It's just a small example terminal emulator. You will probably never find it in any overlay. It's not meant to be used in production.

Screenshot-support is out-of-scope, yepp. There's no reason to provide it as you can use wlterm to debug the term-emulation layer.

[thx1111]

Building wlterm will need libtsm-git as of 2015 Feb.

For me, cut and paste is important enough to favor using a traditional linux terminal at the moment. I look forward to having mouse/cursor support in kmscon.

[MacSlow]

I have implemented a gpm-like mouse-based copy&paste support im my fork of kmscon. See https://github.com/MacSlow/kmscon/tree/mouse-support and https://blog.macslow.org/?p=407

Better late than never :)

[thx1111]

Thanks for that. After 8 years, I'd forgotten that you were working on kmscon. Hmm - I'm running Arch Linux, and I notice that the Arch kmscon package is now using the kmscon fork from "Aetf", the provider of libtsm, from https://github.com/Aetf/kmscon . In particular, the current version of kmscon from Aetf uses the meson build system instead of autotools. Maybe you could rebase to the Aetf fork?

[MacSlow]

Thanks for that. After 8 years, I'd forgotten that you were working on kmscon. Hmm - I'm running Arch Linux, and I notice that the Arch kmscon package is now using the kmscon fork from "Aetf", the provider of libtsm, from https://github.com/Aetf/kmscon . In particular, the current version of kmscon from Aetf uses the meson build system instead of autotools. Maybe you could rebase to the Aetf fork?

I just finished that porting work. Now I am waiting for feedback from the 'upstream' folks around aetf's branch. You can watch that here: Aetf#54

Also see: https://github.com/MacSlow/kmscon-aetf