I recently noticed a bug when you start GNU Emacs win32 after starting Windows Magnifier: Emacs' cursor becomes a single-pixel "caret" instead of the box cursor. This makes the cursor very hard to find.
I usually leave Emacs' cursor at the default (box
) because this is so much easier to see, especially if you also enable blink-cursor-mode
(though that's a matter of taste, I suppose). The default settings also set the cursor to a hollow
box when the window
(or the entire frame
) is inactive.
Really, a text editor is unusable with a "caret" or bar-shaped cursor.
The following behaviors are observed with this bug:
cursor-type
variable: it is always as-if the value were (bar . 1)
(a vertical bar, one pixel wide)blink-cursor-mode
or notHKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\CaretWidth
also has no bearing on the cursor shape (though this key is great for setting the cursor thickness in other Windows programs...)cursor-type
So, the work-around for this is to start Emacs before you run Magnifier (especially: make sure the Windows Accessibility feature that starts Magnifier when you log in, is turned OFF).
As far as I can tell, there is no bug report for this. I may file one when I get around to figuring out GNU's bug-tracker.