Input and TextArea have cursor blinking even though terminal window is not focused

[villekr]

Following simple app has Input and TextArea widgets. Focus transitions between them as expected. However, when I focus some other window than iTerm2 running textual app then cursor still keeps on blinking on the previously focused widget. I would expect that by default focus is removed alltogether from app when other window gets focus. Or is this something app needs to be specifically configured?

I added also _on_app_focus annd _on_app_blur event handlers for debugging, but they are not invoked. Maybe these are only relevant for textual-web based on comments (# Required by textual-web to manage focus in a web page.)

As this might be platform/terminal related here's the configuration I have.

macOS Sonoma: Version 14.3
iTerm2: Build 3.4.23
Python 3.12
Textual 0.52.1

from textual import events
from textual.app import App, ComposeResult
from textual.containers import Vertical
from textual.widgets import Input, TextArea


class AppFocus(App):

    def compose(self) -> ComposeResult:
        with Vertical():
            yield TextArea()
            yield Input()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    AppFocus().run()

[davep]

The cursor within those controls isn't the terminal's own cursor; it is an effect provided by the widgets themselves. Those widgets can't know if the terminal emulator window you're using is focused in your environment.

To the best of my knowledge AppFocus and AppBlur are only supported when the application is being used via textual-web (this is how they're documented in the docs).

[davep]

On macOS:

• Kitty¹
• iTerm2
• Contour
• terminal.app
• wezterm
• rio
• Tabby
• VSCode terminal

On Windows 11 (testing the ones that don't overlap with the above):

• Terminal
• Hyper

While I suspect it was more down to how the underlying driver handles incoming stuff, I'd also note that these seemed to turn up at very unreliable times; without diving into the code right this moment I think that's likely down to how the driver approaches unknown escape sequences, but I thought it worth a note as something to be aware of (a "laggy" handling of app focus/blur would be worse than no handling).

Footnotes

1. Also works with Kitty's own internal windowing facility, so splitting a window and swapping to another "pane" in the same focused OS-level window sent the relevant escape sequence. ↩

[TomJGooding]

Surprisingly even the old Windows conhost seems to support it from a quick test.

[davep]

New challenge: find something that doesn't.

[TomJGooding]

Indeed...

Apparently iTerm has a "Apps may turn on Focus Reporting" option in the advanced settings - might be worth trying that?

[davep]

Good catch.

[villekr]

Taken care in #4265. So this can be closed. Thanks for the textual devs for making this improvement!