Total Commander

Lefteous

What about “Marching ants” marking ?

Paul

2Vansumsen

Hello Paul !

What about “Marching ants” marking ?

• Certainly efficient, unambiguous (like in Excel)… and very luxurious !

 Friendly,
Claude
Clo

An inactive cursor should always be a reduction of the active cursor. Marching ants looks much more active than just a dotted rectangle.

@Clo:

• Here too, since Win 3.1 …
But indeed, that looks too colorful for the fans of black_blue_white_grey made in M$…
- It's a Win setting, easy to change within a few minutes…

The Windows colour settings affect all programs and all their title bars. Although this is for sure interesting as well for some – great app for classic colour themes is 3DCC – it can also have the opposite effect. If all is a sea of green and red, the important signal character can be lost, that's why I would prefer to see a TC internal mechanism to better visualize the active/inactive panels, independant of Windows settings. I prefer unobtrusive colour settings as well, I don't like to watch at Wizball colour pots 100% of the time.

Icfu

My first reaction on this was : support.. But then I started to wonder.
I consider this, as Clo mentioned, as quite luxurious. And I first have a remark
2 DrShark
You support someone elses suggestion, but you haven't convinced me with any argumentation of the advantages of this.
If I want to know which one on the other side had the cursor, I just hit Tab twice.
And the cursor could have been on a subdir as well, not only a file, btw.

I can understand the fears of Christian with two different cursors at the same time. Two cursors is also a bit of a contradiction I guess.
So this is effectively reduced to a matter of how to visualize this condition, in favour of survey.

To implement this anyway, it sometimes can help to reverse the solution.
As Lefteous stated, the inactive one shouldn't draw more attention. So in the case of Vansumsen's idea,
it's the active cursor which should get the 'marching ants', and the inactive one a fixed cursor.

And if this would be done, I certainly would prefer a TC-native solution, instead of using windoze-things.

I was just thinking about a combination of:
- dim the brightness in the inactive panel
- and leave the cursor how it is

The cursor and its design stays untouched, but is shown in the inactive panel.
All other files (background of the inactive panel) appears a little bit darker.

I would choose both...

Dim inactive panel.
Dim inactive panel cursor.

By "Dim" is meant: reduce the saturation/contrast of the entire inactive panel slightly: font colors and background colors.

I use a "reversed" cursor. A non-reversed cursor (ie. the outline) would suffice for the inactive panel.

It must be something which cannot be mistaken for a cursor under any conditions, e.g. when the cursor in the active panel is scrolled outside of the visible area (by using the mouse), and only the inactive cursor is visible.

Maybe some kind of icon overlay, like an arrow or triangle?

ghisler(Author) wrote:Maybe some kind of icon overlay, like an arrow or triangle?

That absolutely works for me! A simple geometric shape (triangle, not arrow, for instance) would be the least visually confusing.

I think that a different color cursor would be the best. Would also help to distinguish the active / inactive panels.

2 ghisler

Great. This was my first idea concerning this thread, something with the icon, using it as an indicator.
I thought about e.g. reversed colors, but I guessed this would be quite hard to implement, and didn't mention it.

Now you say an overlay is possible, so support ++

ghisler(Author) wrote:Maybe some kind of icon overlay, like an arrow or triangle?

Sounds nice, I'd prefer a triangle.

Either small and designed attractively (like solid and the opposite to the background color)
or big and of less attractive design (like transparent and in a muted color).

StatusQuo wrote:

ghisler(Author) wrote:Maybe some kind of icon overlay, like an arrow or triangle?

Sounds nice, I'd prefer a triangle.

Either small and designed attractively (like solid and the opposite to the background color)
or big and of less attractive design (like transparent and in a muted color).

Color is a problem. People use different backgrounds.

m^2 wrote:Color is a problem. People use different backgrounds.

Yes, an argument to add an option in the color configuration.

ghisler(Author) wrote:......
Maybe some kind of icon overlay, like an arrow or triangle?

Anything that can indicate the cursor position of inactive panel will be helpful!

So, will this feature request be in the todo list?