Selection backgrounds are clobbered by rulers.

[7ombie]

Summary

Whenever a selection crosses over a ruler, the foreground color gets updated correctly, but the background color remains the same (the ruler color).

Reproduction Steps

Enable rulers (adding something like rulers = [80] in the [editor] section of your config.toml). Then, create a selection that spans a ruler.

The background color of the ruler-column does not change to the selection color (while the foreground color updates correctly). This includes the cursor, so when you only have a cursor (a single-character selection), your cursor seems to disappear behind the ruler.

Note: I also reported that my cursor never blinks in Helix (this was in a separate issue that somebody else opened). That issue may be contributing to the issue I'm having here.

Helix log

n/a

Platform

macOS Ventura 13.4

Terminal Emulator

iTerm2 3.4.19

Helix Version

helix 23.05 (7f5940b)

[kirawi]

Seems like a duplicate of #5675?

[7ombie]

I'm not sure it's the same. Maybe, but I don't think so. This seems to be related to an oversight with the rulers specifically, which take precedence over the theme's background color (as they should), but also take precedence over the selection/cursor color (incorrectly).

#5675 changes the cursor color over whitespace, while this issue fails to adopt the selection color when the selection spans a ruler. I'll try and upload a screenshot (I'm on holiday, in a caravan).

[7ombie]

Below are two screenshots which represent an animation (I cannot upload video at the moment).

I have two rulers (20 columns apart), and I'm in Select Mode, moving the cursor to the right...

Note that the foreground color is always correct, including turning black when the cursor is over (under) the ruler (my theme sets the cursor foreground color to black).

P.S. Ignore the apostrophe in ruler's. I don't know what happened there.

[gabydd]

yeah this is the same problem as in #5675 it happens because the selection(and the cursor) is rendered before the rulers, see how rulers is called after selections

helix/helix-term/src/ui/editor.rs

Lines 148 to 154 in d5af603

	Self::doc_selection_highlights(
	editor.mode(),
	doc,
	view,
	theme,
	&config.cursor_shape,
	),

helix/helix-term/src/ui/editor.rs

Line 199 in d5af603

Self::render_rulers(editor, doc, view, inner, surface, theme);

[pascalkuthe]

We could render the rulers before the text to fix this line we do for the cursorsline/cursorcolumn. That would mean that themes that define background color for their text would clobber the rules but we are sort of leaning towards forbidding that anyways since the same caveats apply to any background decoration like cursor line/current debug breakpoint,...

[the-mikedavis]

There was #3599 along those lines but foreground rulers would completely disappear. I think we could render the background and modifier parts of the ruler Style before the text highlights and then the foreground part afterwards so it would layer correctly.

[the-mikedavis]

Or I suppose we would want the background part of the ruler to be rendered on top of the text highlights but below the selection highlights.

I wonder if we should also not allow the reversed modifier to affect rulers and other decorations like indent guides? I think we could swap the foreground/backgrounds for those Styles when the existing Style has the reversed modifier.

[7ombie]

Thanks for looking into this. Much appreciated.