No blinking | JURTA
JURTA
Site Map
About<br>JUR
I, Robot
Prog
Babel Mobile<br>Firefox<br>Drupal<br>Jekyll<br>No blinking
Emacs
.emacs<br>ee
ee-bbdb<br>ee-buffers<br>ee-commands<br>ee-customize<br>ee-dired<br>ee-dselect<br>ee-edb<br>ee-example<br>ee-fields<br>ee-finder<br>ee-gnus<br>ee-history<br>ee-imenu<br>ee-info<br>ee-marks<br>ee-menubar<br>ee-outline<br>ee-processes<br>ee-programs<br>ee-ps<br>ee-tags<br>ee-views<br>ee-windows<br>ee-datafile
NEWS.ee<br>TODO.ee<br>ee.ee<br>ell.ee
ee-textfile
ee-apachelog<br>ee-changelog
ee-viewfile
view/links.ee
Travel
Animals<br>Estonia
Hamlet
No blinking
How to disable blinking cursors
Illustration by courtesy<br>of
One of the most famous methods of torture is<br>Chinese<br>water torture. In this torture a tied person is placed under<br>a bucket filled with water with a tiny hole in the bottom. Water is<br>slowly dripped on to a person's forehead, eventually driving the<br>victim insane.
Software development is not an easy task, and often after a painful<br>process of writing a program developers feel they should share their<br>pains with users, so they put a part of own sufferings onto the<br>shoulders of users in a method similar to the Chinese water torture -<br>blinking cursors.
Fortunately, programmers are not insensitive torturers, and<br>sometimes they provide an option in their programs to turn blinking<br>cursers off. Often these options are not documented, and are not<br>easily accessible, but many users can't stand the blinking cursor<br>for a long time, because blinking cursors are very distracting.
This page was created with the aim to collect in one place all<br>methods to disable the blinking cursor in the most popular operating<br>systems and programs. If you know how to turn blinking off in<br>a program not listed here, please add precise instructions as a comment<br>at the bottom of this page.
GNU Emacs
Turning the blinking cursor off in GNU Emacs is easy. Just type:
M-x blink-cursor-mode RET
where M-x means hold ALT and type `x'.
Note that this command is effective only when Emacs<br>displays through a window system, because then Emacs does its own<br>cursor display. On a text-only terminal, this doesn't work.<br>You should look for separate settings of your terminal.
If you want to turn blink OFF permanently in GNU Emacs,<br>put in your ~/.emacs the following line:
(blink-cursor-mode (- (*) (*) (*)))
where (*) (*) (*) depicts the blinking cursor,<br>and the minus sign negates it. :)
To achieve the same result, you can modify the command line to run Emacs with the following command line arguments<br>-nbc or<br>--no-blinking-cursor<br>that will disable the blinking cursor on graphical displays.
Alternatively, if your X resource file (usually named<br>~/.Xdefaults or ~/.Xresources) contains the X resource name<br>cursorBlink (class CursorBlink)<br>then if the value of this resource is off or false or 0 at<br>startup, Emacs disables Blink Cursor mode. Examples:
*cursorBlink: off<br>*CursorBlink: off
Note that this doesn't work on a text-only terminal.<br>You have to look for separate settings of your<br>terminal to configure the terminal's cursor style.
Even when the terminal default cursor is configured<br>to be non-blinking, some terminals (such as Urxvt)<br>interpret the cvvis ("cursor very visible") terminfo sequence<br>as a request to start blinking the cursor again.<br>Sending this sequence can be disabled in Emacs by adding<br>to your .emacs configuration:
(setq visible-cursor nil)
XEmacs
The development of XEmacs was easier than the development of GNU<br>Emacs, because XEmacs developers don't have to sign legal papers to be<br>able to borrow existing code from GNU Emacs to XEmacs. Since the<br>development of XEmacs was easier, XEmacs developers decided not to<br>share their pains with users, and turned the blinking cursor off by<br>default.
Vi
Another proof Vi is not better than Emacs is that<br>GVIM (a GTK version of Vi IMproved) blinks the cursor by default too.<br>If you for some reason prefer using Vi instead of Emacs,<br>you can disable the blinking cursor in GVIM by putting<br>the following line in ~/.gvimrc:
set guicursor=a:blinkon0
In Neovim (“improved Vi IMproved”) version 0.2 and later, put in init.vim:
set guicursor=
GTK applications in Gnome
To disable blinking cursors in fields and text boxes in Gnome and<br>GTK applications, run one of the following programs:
gnome-control-center<br>gnome-keyboard-properties
and select the option to disable the cursor to blink.<br>This will create the file ~/desktop/gnome/interface/cursor_blink<br>in your home directory.
From the command line, you can do it with the following command:
gconftool-2 --set "/desktop/gnome/interface/cursor_blink"<br>--type boolean "False"
In GNOME 3 cursor blinking can be disabled with gsettings:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-blink false
Make sure you run gnome-settings-daemon. In GNOME 3<br>this is no longer in $PATH, it's here:
/usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon/gnome-settings-daemon
Running this is necessary if you're not using a full GNOME<br>installation, e.g. with gnome-session or gnome-display-manager.
Update 10 July 2017: Note that in Gnome 3.24,...