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Comment by artmageddon | Hacker News Reader

While I appreciate the ability to be able to disable the blinking cursor, does anyone else not mind the cursor? Personally I'd rather know where my input focus is(how many times have you dealt with a poorly-written UI that doesn't have a logical tab ordering?), or at least know that I'm able to start typing, rather than wonder if the application in question is blocking input because of execution... comparing it to "torture" seems a little far-fetched.

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I actually prefer a blinking cursor so long as the window has focus. This is the default of gvim and emacs. Though the one good thing about this article is that it finally got me to read the urxvt man page to figure out how to get urxvt to do that (it defaults to no blink).

I actually prefer a blinking cursor so long as the window has focus.

Both you and a commenter below (wzdd: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2629575) mention this. I've never encountered cursor-blinking-without-window-focus in any app I've ever used - what programs actually exhibit such obnoxious behaviour?

This occurs in the search form (in a white label version of IE, if I'm not mistaken) at the local public library (they have numerous terminals scattered throughout the library). It's rather annoying to see the blinking cursor, start typing, have nothing happen, and have to find the mouse, locate the bleeping mouse cursor, and click in the test box.

Yeah, it doesn't bother me a bit. In fact, I think I'm the target audience for the blinking cursor because I find it makes it a lot easier to find the cursor. I quite like it.

I agree, it's quite frustrating to not know where you input location is. I've also had issues using multiple VMs you can have multiple cursors all of which are blinking. Nonetheless the blinking cursor is an important queue when focus doesn't just follow your eyes. (Though even that would be bad when you wanted to read one thing and type to another place.)

I don't mind a blinking cursor at all, but a blinking cursor in a non-focused window drives me insane.

Fortunately, I don't run any programs which do such a thing nowadays.

Maybe it's the old-school in me, but I don't mind it at all. It only becomes torture when I can't figure out what to type and the cursor continues to blink... mocking me...

Maybe your brain is just wired a little bit differently than mine. As for me, I often (not always) find it difficult to focus on a piece of text or code when something in my peripheral vision is blinking on off on off on off look at me look at me lookit lookit lookit.

Naturally in that situation a blinking thin-line caret is much less aggravating than, say, a block cursor the size of a character cell.

A blinking one-pixel-wide bar is OK, when in focus. What drives me nuts is a blinking block like in consoles or Emacs: to me it's jumping up and down shouting "look at me, look at me!", and I came up with that description completely independently of breadbox here.

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