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Comment by tpmx | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Emacs since 1996. One of the many reasons I like it is the default non-blinking full block cursor. It brings a certain calmness to the editing process. No stress or distraction. It feels so clean.

It's interesting how very subtle design decisions like these matter so much.

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My perception is the opposite: it's stressful to see a non-blinking block cursor, because that's what emacs looks like when it locks up. Frozen cursors are the very first visible indication. Switching to a "calm" cursor, to me, would feel a bit like an Apple user setting their default mouse cursor to a pinwheel of doom [0].

(Background: emacs is a single-threaded lisp program, and "blink the cursor" is just another lisp function [1] running on an event timer. (At least that's the case in GTK emacs). So if any lisp function hard-crashes, the cursor will immediately crash too).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_pinwheel

[1] https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/emacs-28/lisp/fra...

I prefer a blinking cursor, otherwise I often find it hard to find the cursor on the screen.

Also prefer block cursor to underline cursor for the same reason.

On Windows Terminal and others, I think you can use a non standard color (example: red, pink...) which should help you easily locate it.

Emacs has a lot of cool little touches to the way it blinks the cursor.

blink-cursor-delay (defaults to 0.5 seconds): Keeps the cursor visible and not blinking when you're rapidly navigating around or typing. Most other apps seem to do this sort of thing too, but it's an easy detail to overlook.

blink-cursor-blinks (defaults to 10): Blinks the cursor a certain number of times and then stops blinking.

One way I do customize it is to set blink-cursor-alist to '((t . hollow)). When the cursor blinks it alternates between a full block and the outline of a block so that it never disappears completely.

Is that the default? The cursor in my Emacs blinks and I don't believe I told it to.

Edit: M-x blink-cursor-mode FTW - thanks!

Uh, please clarify? :)

I do believe it is the default. Hard to know what's default when you've been carrying over your .emacs for two decades.

Every single fresh install on random throwaway installs I've done has defaulted to a single non-blinking block cursor though.

It's easy -- just run "emacs -q" to bypass all your local config. Default in GUI is a blinking cursor. (Default in terminal is the terminal's own blink default.)

> Default in GUI is a blinking cursor. (Default in terminal is the terminal's own blink default.)

Ah, that probably explains my confusion. Sorry about spreading it.

Emacs does blink by default. On the other hand, it is the only piece of software I know with `blink-cursor-blinks` - which is I think 10 by default, I've reduced it to 3 - so the cursor blinks only a couple times and then stops.

Blinking can be disabled in RStudio, too, though it's not the default. I know this because RStudio doesn't respect my XFCE settings, where blinking can also be disabled, or the blinking-rate set (almost) OS-wide.

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