Feature request: configurable text highlighting/dimming for cursor line
Thank you for continuing to develop such a high-quality application!
Exploring the settings today, I found the Cursor Guide and Cursor Boost options. These are pretty good for what they do! A good extension of Cursor Boost might be to selectively allow for lines outside of the currently selected line to be dimmed (that is, to reduce text contrast vis-a-vis background color -- to make text darker against a dark background, lighter against a light background).
In my testing, I found that Cursor Guide couldn't be used to "un-dim" lines that had been dimmed by Cursor Boost. Cursor Boost applied to all text including the active line, and Cursor Guide changed only the background color of the active line (rather than the text color).
Imagine a terminal with []
denoting the cursor position:
AAAA
BBBB
CCCC[]
DDDD
EEEE
As a user, I would like to selectively dim the text on lines A, B, D, and E, while retaining normal text brightness for line C, so that I can focus my attention to line C. I would like to achieve this without changing the background color of the active line.
This is similar to, but distinct from, the current action of both Cursor Boost and Cursor Guide. Right now, assuming a dark terminal with bright default text, you could use a sufficiently bright Cursor Guide color with Cursor Boost turned up. This effectively inverts the terminal color on the active line, though, which isn't exactly desirable.
A stretch feature: As a user, I would like to configure the dimming context to some number of lines before and after the cursor, so that I can focus my attention to multiple lines in context. In the above example, with a "before" of 1 and an "after" of 1, that would look like selectively dimming the text of lines A and E, while retaining text brightness for lines B, C, and D. For a related example of context here, grep
has a notion of after-context, before-context, and context settings.
The motivation for this feature is readability, accessibility, and reading disorders. A common intervention for reading difficulty in print media is to use a reading strip, such as this. I would love to have a setting available that emulates this behavior in the terminal, to improve readability of large text files and the like.
Incidentally, another common reading intervention is to use a "cursor", such as a finger or pencil, and we already have that by way of the terminal cursor itself.
Thanks for the consideration here!
Possibly related to #7231
- iTerm2 version: 3.3.0
- OS version: MacOS 10.14.6