Cursor shapes & colours (was Re: What private changes to Viper and/or Vimpulse do you have in your .emacs file?)

[Štěpán Němec]

Tim Harper <timcharper at gmail.com> writes:

> On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 12:39 PM, Tim Harper <timcharper at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 11:48 AM, Stephen Bach <sjbach at sjbach.com> wrote:
>>> On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 10:40:38PM +0000, Jason Spiro wrote:
>>>> Hi all,
>>>>
>>>> I am curious:  what private changes to Viper and/or Vimpulse do you have
> in your
>>>> .emacs file?  You can tell us:
>>>
>>
>> here are mine:
>>
>> http://gist.github.com/487857
>>
> What would you guys think about making the cursor-type changes a part
> of vimpulse?  Is anyone happy with just changing the color of the
> cursor?  Is that functionality already there somewhere, and I missed
> it?

I think this is really a matter of personal preference, and tastes
differ. AFAIK the current Vimpulse behaviour in GUI is exactly the same
as in GVim, i.e. full rectangular cursor in Normal and Visual mode, bar
cursor in Insert mode, half-height cursor during operator input (with a
minor difference from GVim). Plus you can set the
viper-FOO-state-cursor-color variables to further customize the colours.

IIUC (I haven't actually tried your code), the changes in your
customisation change it to: bar cursor in Emacs state, hollow rectange
in Vi state, horizontal bar in Visual state. I believe (and suspect I
wouldn't be the only one) particularly the former two are rather
problematic -- hollow rectange is normally used to indicate point
position in inactive (i.e. unfocused) windows in Emacs; and I *do* want
different cursor in Emacs vs. Insert state (as is currently the case and
apparently not with your customisation).

So I'd leave it as is -- it's a matter of a few lines for those who want
something different, and it tends to be really hard to satisfy all users
in this regard, so I'd stick with the both Vim-compatible and Emacs-sane
defaults.

Štěpán