4coder»Forums
Evan Butterfield
7 posts / 1 project
Gray cursor

Hello, I'm sorry is this is a stupid question, but what is the little gray text cursor that the regular cursor leaves behind. It gets kind of annoying if I want to copy text because I have to use my cursor to click and drag it before I can copy anything. Is there a way to make it move with the regular text cursor unless I am holding down shift? Thank you.

Simon Anciaux
1337 posts
Gray cursor
Edited by Simon Anciaux on Reason: typo

In config.4coder you can change the selection mode.

// mode = "4coder";
mode = "notepad-like";

The gray cursor is called the mark. It's a different selection scheme where you move the regular cursor around, press set_mark (default is Control + Space) to place the mark at the current cursor position. The selection is the area between the cursor and the mark.

It has some advantages:

  • don't need to keep a key press;
  • less likely to lose the selection by pressing a key by mistake;
  • you can "start a selection" than do other things and come back and the selection "start" is still at the same point;
  • you can swap the cursor and the mark (control + m by default) to move the cursor between two points in the file.

But it's less visually clear what the selection is especially when the mark is off screen so you don't know if the selection is going up or down. But you can draw the cursor differently to help with that.

Evan Butterfield
7 posts / 1 project
Gray cursor

Thank you for replying! And, yeah, the CTRL + Space was the exact command I was looking for!