Inform on Mac - no cursor?

I’m using Inform 1.68.1 on MacOS Catalina. There’s no cursor in the authoring pane, which makes it hard to find where I am.

Anyone else experience this? Is there a solution?

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I haven’t heard of that happening.

You’ve done all the dumb stuff like switching to a different tab and back, selecting some text, etc?

EDIT: Okay, I heard of it back in November but forgot because I never use dark mode. Sorry. :)

This happens to me while my Mac is in Dark Mode. (I think the issue is that Catalina is smart enough to automatically change the cursor color to white while Dark Mode is active, but it doesn’t/can’t change the background color of the authoring pane.)

The developers have been made aware of the issue so hopefully a future release of Inform 7 will include an incredibly slick dedicated Dark Mode interface.

In the meantime, what I do is: Exit Dark Mode when I’m using Inform 7. I only have Dark Mode active at night, but from your post it sounds like maybe you have it active all the time, so that’s somewhat more inconvenient.

Using this tutorial I set up a keyboard shortcut for toggling Dark Mode, which should make things a little more convenient. (It always toggles back on its own when I leave my computer for a few minutes, but you might not experience that if you don’t have the time-based activation set up.)

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Yes, that was it exactly. I implemented the keyboard shortcut to toggle. Thanks a lot!

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Now, in 2022 at least, there’s a version of Inform on the App Store that works better than the version one can download from the Inform website. Instead of having to change from dark mode to light mode, the version from the Apple App store works perfectly in either light or dark mode.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/inform/id920947685?mt=12

EDIT: Scratch that. While the version in the Apps store does fix the dark mode, things won’t compile at all using this version (something about 32- vs 64-bit). I can’t believe an unworking version can be left on the app store for years like this. Ugh. So I guess I’ll go back to the “Interim” 2019 version and deal with the dark/light mode problem.

There is a trick by which you can exempt the Inform application from dark mode, but it doesn’t seem to work 100% reliably.