Thread: How to blink text?

Depends on the system you are trying to blink text within. In old-times on a monochrome screen, you would set the top bit in the text colour attribute and it would automatically blink at approximately 2Hz.

For more modern systems, you actually have to draw the text and then undraw it [or, if you use a VGA style text-screen, you could perhaps change the attribute to be "same text and background colour"].

In a windowed environment, you'd definitely be drawing and erasing the text to make it blink.

As to changing colour, that is the same concept - in VGA/CGA/MGA you can change the attribute that goes with each character, in Windowing mode, you'd be setting the colour before you draw the text.

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Mats

Well, that again, depends on the environment you want to do it in.

This will sort of work reasonably portable to a console type application - you may need to adjust the slowdown() numbers to make it right.

Code:

void slowdown(int count)
{
    while(--count) {
        putchar(0);
    }
}

int main()
{
    char *s ="Some text";
    int i;
    for(;;) {
        printf("%s", s);
        slowdown(1000);
        putchar('\r');
        for(i = 0; i < strlen(s); i++)
           putchar(' ');
        slowdown(1000);
    }
}

I haven't tested that. But anything more advanced would be dependant on the system it's implemented on.

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Mats

You may need to #include <string.h> and <stdio.h> - the above code wasn't meant to be a "complete compilable file", but rather to show the essential bits.

--
Mats