The console dimension and cursor position are available through the /dev/vcsa interface already. However the /dev/vcsa header format uses single-byte fields therefore those values are clamped to 255. As surprizing as this may seem, some people do use 240-column 67-row screens (a 1920x1080 monitor with 8x16 pixel fonts) which is getting close to the limit. Monitors with higher resolution are not uncommon these days (3840x2160 producing a 480x135 character display) and it is just a matter of time before someone with, say, a braille display using the Linux VT console and BRLTTY on such a screen reports a bug about missing and oddly misaligned screen content. Let's add VT_GETCONSIZECSRPOS for the retrieval of console size and cursor position without byte-sized limitations. The actual console size limit as encoded in vt.c is 32767x32767 so using a short here is appropriate. Then this can be used to get the cursor position when /dev/vcsa reports 255. The screen dimension may already be obtained using TIOCGWINSZ and adding the same information to VT_GETCONSIZECSRPOS might be redundant. However applications that care about cursor position also care about display size and having 2 separate system calls to obtain them separately is wasteful. Also, the cursor position can be queried by writing "\e[6n" to a tty and reading back the result but that may be done only by the actual application using that tty and not a sideline observer.
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| @@ -2,6 +2,8 @@ · 1 unmodified line | ||
| 2 | 2 | #ifndef _UAPI_LINUX_VT_H |
| 3 | 3 | #define _UAPI_LINUX_VT_H |
| 4 | 4 | |
| 5 | +#include <linux/ioctl.h> | |
| 6 | +#include <linux/types.h> | |
| 5 | 7 | |
| 6 | 8 | /* |
| 7 | 9 | * These constants are also useful for user-level apps (e.g., VC |
| @@ -84,4 +86,13 @@ struct vt_setactivate { · 76 unmodified lines | ||
| 84 | 86 | |
| 85 | 87 | #define VT_SETACTIVATE 0x560F /* Activate and set the mode of a console */ |
| 86 | 88 | |
| 89 | +/* get console size and cursor position */ | |
| 90 | +struct vt_consizecsrpos { | |
| 91 | + __u16 con_rows; /* number of console rows */ | |
| 92 | + __u16 con_cols; /* number of console columns */ | |
| 93 | + __u16 csr_row; /* current cursor's row */ | |
| 94 | + __u16 csr_col; /* current cursor's column */ | |
| 95 | +}; | |
| 96 | +#define VT_GETCONSIZECSRPOS _IOR('V', 0x10, struct vt_consizecsrpos) | |
| 97 | + | |
| 87 | 98 | #endif /* _UAPI_LINUX_VT_H */ |