Let Emacs move the cursor off-screen

Question

Is it possible to let Emacs have the cursor be moved off-screen, like most GUI text editors work? This is one of the biggest things that bothers me when I use Emacs over any GUI editor. When I scroll down, the cursor is "pushed forward" by the top of the buffer.

I had previously thought that this was completely impossible, because this is hard-wired into the architecture of Emacs, but then I saw multiple-cursors, which does exactly this for the secondary cursors (assuming you prevent the scrolling functions from acting on the secondary cursors). Is it maybe possible to use multiple-cursors to have the main cursor in some hidden buffer, and the effective cursor being what I actually edit with? Or maybe some other clever trick? Or maybe my Googling has failed me and this is really already possible without any magic?

Answer 1

There is a new package available on GNU ELPA called scroll-restore that attempts to remedy this problem. So far, I have encountered a few bugs, but the package seems to work as-advertised for the most part.

You can test it out by installing it with

M-x package-install RET scroll-restore RET

After the package is installed, you can enable the minor mode with

M-x scroll-restore-mode

Personally, I am binding it to the Scroll Lock key because it seems so incredibly apropos! This is what I am adding to my init file:

(require 'scroll-restore)
(scroll-restore-mode 1)
;; Allow scroll-restore to modify the cursor face
(setq scroll-restore-handle-cursor t)
;; Make the cursor invisible while POINT is off-screen
(setq scroll-restore-cursor-type nil)
;; Jump back to the original cursor position after scrolling
(setq scroll-restore-jump-back t)
;; Toggle scroll-restore-mode with the Scroll Lock key
(global-set-key (kbd "<Scroll_Lock>") 'scroll-restore-mode)

This is a direct copy of an answer posted here: https://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/2273/93

Answer 2

Strictly, speaking you can't move the cursor offscreen, because the underlying C code won't let you do it.

This said, I suspect that your problem can be fixed. Basically, there are 2 aspects:

• you don't like the way things look when "the cursor is pushed forward". You could work around that by (temporarily) making the cursor invisible.
• you want to "jump back" to the pre-scrolling position as soon as you issue a non-scrolling command. There's probably some package out there that does it for you, but you can do it yourself with some pre-command-hook hacking.

BTW, I'd welcome patches in Emacs which provide some of that functionality. I hate the "auto jump-back" behavior of other editors, but it would be good to record the "pre-scroll" position and then offer a way to jump back to it.