cursor not vanishing in Linux

Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com
Sun Dec 7 19:15:41 EST 2014


J. Landman Gay wrote:

> On 12/7/2014, 3:04 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
>> Many seeming oddities in the language are merely conventions 
>> established
>> by the HyperCard team.  IIRC the need to lock the cursor to have it
>> maintained after idle is one of them
> 
> It was probably either a SuperCard or MetaCard thing. HC kept the 
> cursor
> set until you changed it again.

We can blame Jeanne, since she doesn't read this list often enough to 
defend herself here. :)

On page 230 of the book she co-authored, "HyperTalk 2.2: The Book" it 
claims:

    At idle time -- when all handlers have finished running -- HyperCard
    sets the cursor back to the cursor for the current tool, or to the
    standard arrow if the pointer is not in the current window.  The
    only way to lock a cursor to a particular image is to use an XCMD.

So lockCursor does appear to have been introduced by SuperCard, and 
later faithfully carried through by MetaCard and hence LiveCode, but its 
revert-on-idle behavior was either present as of HC V2.2 or Jeanne (or 
one of the other two authors) miswrote the cursor entry in their book.

Interestingly, that page goes on to note that there was no way to query 
the current cursor image.   It's been so long since I used HC I'd 
forgotten how limited it was.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
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