Users are discussing an issue where the cursor in the Discourse composer disappears briefly when moving up or down using arrow keys, causing confusion. meglio notes the cursor doesn’t actually disappear but stops blinking temporarily, unlike in other applications like JSFiddle, where the cursor remains visible during movement. sam attributes the issue to a Firefox bug, referencing related meta-discourse threads and a Firefox bug report. meglio questions this, noting the issue occurs consistently and not sporadically, and wonders if it’s due to Discourse using a standard textarea versus JSFiddle’s contenteditable implementation. sam clarifies that JSFiddle uses contenteditable, which supports more advanced cursor behavior, and suggests reporting the issue to the Firefox bug tracker.
As you move cursor up/down by pressing on the up/down arrows, the cursor sometimes disappears for half a second and makes you wonder - where is the cursor? Have I moved it up/down enough? Am I on the right line?
The cursor does not actually disappear per se - it continues to blink with the correct interval. But the way it is currently implemented is not the way it is implemented everywhere else - in text editors, in the browser inputs, in IDEs, etc.
Compare.
Here’s the cursor in Discourse:
Note how I easily manage to quickly press up or down two times and make the cursor invisible while on an empty line. This makes me feel as the cursor disappears and I lose it from sight, and therefore cannot control it precisely.
Compare it to how the cursor works in JSFiddle, as an example:
Note: it doesn’t matter how fast I press on the up/down button, the cursor is always visible as it moves from one line to another. In other words, the blinking “resets” as the cursor moves to another line.
Hope the two videos explain the issue clearly and make it an easy consideration to fix the issue.
But wait, my second video is recorded in Firefox too, and there is no such a problem. Also, I know the reproduction steps exactly, it does not disappear “sporadically” as in the report you linked to. Is this because jsfiddle uses their own rendering mechanism of the cursor while Discourse uses the default textarea and thus is affected by the default cursor Firefox behaviour?