Ever lost sight of the little caret, the thin blinking vertical line
used to indicate where the next character you type in is going to show
up on the screen? If so, you might have experimented with the blinking
rate to make it more conspicuous. If that is not enough for you, this
little system extension could be helpful. It draws the caret with a
line two or three pixels wide instead of only one pixel, the system
default.
This works in all fields that use the system routines for TextEdit
(both with and without styles). They are usually used in dialog fields
(e.g. search/replace), save dialogs, file names in the Finder, and
text windows in TeachText and SimpleText.
This System Extension might be especially useful for PowerBook owners.
There are a few utilities that change the shape of the mouse pointer
when it is in a text field (insertion beam, a vertical line with two
little horizontal bars, one at the top, one at the bottom) to
something more conspicuous. But last time I looked (which was in 1995,
so it might be different nowadays), they did not address the problem
with the thin caret, therefore I decided to write my own little INIT.
There are two versions included, "caretPatch (2 pixels)" and
"caretPatch (3 pixels)". They simply provide two different caret
widths, either 2 or 3 pixels (instead of the sinlge pixel that is the
system default). Note that you should only use one of them (i.e. put
only one of them into the Extension Folder) since they patch the same
routines!
