[mojifwisi]

This might be a dumb question, but how would an off-screen cursor work in a terminal? According to my understanding of the way terminal emulators/ncurses work, the cursor must be positioned somewhere in the screen, even if it isn't visible.

[mrob]

ncurses lets you move the cursor to arbitrary positions, and also lets you hide it. And you can disable echo, so you can type without the cursor having any influence on what you see. This means you can treat the terminal cursor as though it's a software-rendered cursor in a GUI app and apply all the same rules. But nobody considered doing this when Emacs was first written (maybe it wasn't possible then), so the assumption that the cursor is always on screen is difficult to change.

[umanwizard]

I'd be happy to break terminal mode (which I almost never use) in exchange for getting this feature.

[knome]

whereas I use emacs exclusively in terminal mode, and would be rather upset to it no longer supported :)

[umanwizard]

Fair enough, but a straightforward solution would be to just not allow off-screen cursors in terminal mode, and allow them in GUI mode.