dynamic cursorShape for shell vi mode

[mpgarate]

Hello Terminal team 👋

Description of the new feature/enhancement

When normal mode is active in vim or shell vi mode, the cursor stays in the same style ("bar"). On mac and linux terminals the cursor would typically change to something like the "emptyBox" shape for normal mode and "bar" for insert mode.

To reproduce this behavior, we can use Windows Terminal to run cygwin or access a linux machine via ssh and run the following:

set -o vi

Then, pressing escape will enter normal mode where we might expect to see a box highlighting the current letter. Instead we still see the "bar" style, moved one character back. The "box" appearance is helpful to see which character is selected and as a visual aid to know when insert or normal mode is active.

I found a few workarounds for vim using vimrc (i.e. in issue #68) but have not yet seen a suggestion for shell vi mode.

[zadjii-msft]

Maybe some combo of #4106, #1604 - I could have sworn there was a more specific dupe...

[jdebp]

Windows Terminal already supports the DECSCUSR control sequence with parameters from 1 to 8. There's nothing else that Windows Terminal has to do, here, pace the bug about it not taking effect until flushed. The rest is all at the host end.

The rest is a matter of having the Ss and Se capabilities in your terminfo database records, and a shell that understands those (relatively new, as they were invented in 2011) terminal capabilities. It is almost certainly terminal type and terminfo that is your problem here.

[DHowett-MSFT]

Indeed! Thanks @jdebp.

In addition, somebody's put together a solution for versions of readline that do not take Ss and Se into account: https://stackoverflow.com./a/48449104

[mpgarate]

Thank you for the responses. In my case, cygwin with bash 4.4.12 did not work with show-mode-in-prompt, and (as expected) this did not work in an older linux bash 4.2.46 I had available for testing. It will take some more investigation on my part to troubleshoot.