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Allow disabling automatic cursor color adjustment. #20789
Description
Currently cursor color is automatically adjusted to maintain minimum constrast. This means TUIs that normally control the cursor color themselves are no longer able to.
For example, I often intentionally hide the cursor when making certain TUI menus that have another position indicator, like dropdowns where only the line is relevant and the cursor becomes distracting.
It would be great if there was a setting to disable this, just like the general text lightness adjustment setting.
Some videos, where using cursor color as a mode indicator in Vim is not possible in the Windows Terminal:
20261010-1106-11.2291044.mp4
In Wezterm:
Activity
buzztouniverse commentedon Oct 10, 2026
yhdhvyfhv commentedon Oct 10, 2026
buzztouniverse commentedon Oct 11, 2026
However, if adjustIndistinguishableColors already handles cursor colors appropriately, is a new setting might be redundant?
DHowett commentedon Oct 12, 2026
We do not change your cursor color.
As a compatibility fixture,
#ffffffis accepted as a synonym for inverted color cursors.Other than that: we (and I mean the we that Lotte Visser (@yhdhvyfhv) claimed to be part of but is not (as they appear to be a spammer)) do not change your cursor color for perceptual lightness, contrast or anything else.
(Ze Zhang (@buzztouniverse) spam us again and face the consequences.)
simoesd commentedon Oct 12, 2026
In the above video, the cursor is set to
#ABB2BFinherited from the color scheme, but this can be reproduced using a specified color in any profile. So it shouldn't be caused by the special#ffffffbehaviorAnother example, with the cursor being set explicitly to
#F54E70for the current profile only, the same color as the red lines in. The first two rows are from one screenshot, the bottom two are from another, put together to more easily show the difference in colors. Resulting cursor backgrounds are#CA1E4Efor the "a" in the orange row, and#FFA3BDfor the s in the red row.The cursor foreground colors are intentionally handled in #15283 (and also doesn't seem to respect the "Adjust lightness of indistiguisable text setting") but I haven't been able to find where background colors are handled.
Obviously I can't comment on whether or not this is intentional, but it's the current behavior. I forgot to include it in the original issue body, but I have been testing this on version 1.25.2733.0
lhecker commentedon Oct 12, 2026
Dustin L. Howett (@DHowett) We do adjust it inside BackendD3D. As mentioned by David Simões (@simoesd), this was done in #15283 to specifically fix #9610:
In my opinion, the
adjustIndistinguishableColorssetting is unrelated, because it is meant to fix issues with poorly behaved terminal applications. The cursor on the other hand is drawn by the terminal and the cursor can be hard to see even if a terminal application is well-behaved. So, if anything this warrants another setting.But before that, I'd like to see the color nudging logic improved because in the screenshot above, the red background should IMO not get adjusted.
DHowett commentedon Oct 12, 2026
Argh, well color me surprised! Sorry!