Cursor sometimes hard to find

[Nocturnal]

Hi,

I've noticed that some images are very good at making the cursor disappear. I took a screenshot of one such occasion:

http://gallery.tungstentech.com/main.php?g2_itemId=1055

I don't know if there's something special about this background color but it would be nice if the cursor would change to a more visible color in cases like this. It seems the cursor color gets modified dynamically to be the reverse of what it's on. I suppose the reverse of 'bland' is 'bland' and then the contrast is zero

[Juan Conejero]

Yes, the cursor is drawn using a XOR combination of image pixels and cursor pixels. Since the cursor is white by default, when the screen rendition has values very close to 127 (the middle of 8-bit integers), the XOR operation does nothing.

One solution is to click on the image. You'll see the cursor because it changes its colors (along with a new feature that I hope you'll like ).

THE solution is that I find time to implement something that I hava planned to solve this issue: selectable cursor colors. In fact this is almost ready; you'll find four cursor colors on the Preferences interface (Colors and Fonts section, Image Cursor item). Right now you can change cursor colors #0 and #1, and you should see the effect immediately. The idea is that several color combinations will be easily selectable with a menu item when I implement this feature.

[Nocturnal]

Hi Juan,

the problem is that active processes such as crop and DBE 'do something' when you click in an image. So it's not a 'free' operation.

As an aside I noticed that the crop rectangle in Irfanview which I used to capture the screenshot was also barely visible. Nebulosity2 has crosshairs that sometimes disappear for the same reason. So this is a common problem. I'm assuming the cursor color gets set by the graphics hardware, right?

[Juan Conejero]

the problem is that active processes such as crop and DBE 'do something' when you click in an image. So it's not a 'free' operation.

When a dynamic interface is active you can select the readout mode (Alt+R). To continue the dynamic operation you can select the dynamic mode (Alt+D).

In addition, you can set a STF to darken the image slightly. In this way the cursor will be well visible.

I'm assuming the cursor color gets set by the graphics hardware, right?

Not in PixInsight. Everything on the GUI is drawn without the help of any OS resources, other than those necessary to build pixmaps and draw them on the screen.

For this reason we can solve this issue changing the cursor color through preferences and, when I implement it, through a set of dedicated options. Benefits of platform independence

By the way, you asked about changing preferences not working - remember that you must execute the Preferences process globally (F6).