Draw a line at some position

[elenakrittik]

I'm making a text prompt and i need to draw the cursor. I tried searching but mostly to no avail. I tried using a low-width white rectangle as a cursor but then noticed that i would need to create a new mesh for every different height.

(I also couldn't find how to reliably calculate the (visual/pixel/screen) position of a character in a Text, but that's another question.)

Thank you in advance.

[rparrett]

Within the context of bevy_ui, the easiest way to draw a rectangle is to use a Node with a background color.

I have also seen the following hacks in the wild for drawing cursors:

• Splitting the text into a before cursor, cursor, and after cursor spans, drawing the cursor as a | character using a special font with a zero-width | glyph.
  (courtesy of bevy_simple_text_input)
• Duplicating the pre-cursor text, measuring its width, and using that width to position a Node with a background color.
  (courtesy of bevy_editor_prototypes)

i would need to create a new mesh for every different height.

You can create a square rectangle mesh once and use the scale property on Transform to get different heights.

I also couldn't find how to reliably calculate the (visual/pixel/screen) position of a character

There is TextLayoutInfo. Beware PositionedGlyph.size, which is probably not what you expect, especially for for space characters. See #18032

[ickshonpe]

You don't want to spawn a node or separate entity for just a cursor probably, the simplest method is to draw it using an extraction function.
Made a quick PR with a basic implementation: #17956

[elenakrittik]

That's interesting, but i'm afraid i don't quite understand the solution. There's no docs on ExtractedNode or related types, and it also seems like this wouldn't be possible to implement externally (without changing bevy's code)