Character 208 acts strangs in console, when moving mouse

Dan Nelson dnelson at allantgroup.com
Wed Dec 5 07:57:17 PST 2007


In the last episode (Dec 05), Reko Turja said:
>> When i display character 208 in my console and move my mouse, i see
>> the strangest things. FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE-p8, with default screenmap
>> and console settings.
>> 
>> http://www.xs4all.nl/~whendrik/download/mouse
>> 
>> wget and cat that file in a console to see the effect.
>> 
>> I tried it on my laptop and desktop PC with same kernel. Anyone else
>> experience this problem/effect? I think it should be a pi character
>> upside down, mostly used to draw tables in combination with other
>> characters...
> 
> Mouse cursor mapping artifact. In text mode on PC hardware, the mouse 
> pointer has to be mapped to a character in order to show "fancy" pointer. 
> Nothing to worry about.

Someone with a lot of time could modify syscons to treat the 256
hardware VGA characters as a "window" onto a larger character space,
and dynamically remap them as needed.  That and a unicode VGA font
(like at http://www.inp.nsk.su/~bolkhov/files/fonts/univga/ ) would
allow a utf-8 console to display the 256 most common characters on the
screen (252 if the mouse is onscreen) whatever they happen to be.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list