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Disabling cursor blinking in GTK+

Darren Roberts asks via the EADS Linux list:

In pidgin how can I stop the cursor blinking?

Since we’ve had our Jabber server set up at the office there have been countless questions about using pidgin to the various lists, and I feel the answer that should often be given is: Use something else. There are plenty of other clients available; empathy is installed on all our Solaris and Linux boxes now, gossip may already be installed, emacs-jabber seems popular with many of our emacs using developers, gajim comes recommended by a few users or my favourite bitlbee. Now, with the rant out of the way we can go back to the question at hand…

Cursor blinking is a severe annoyance for some people(not me, I patch apps to add it), and disabling it for GTK+ applications is really quite simple. If you’re a GNOME user then the setting to change blinking is in the keyboard properties dialog that can be found in the system menu. If you’re using KDE you should edit ~/.gtkrc-2.0-kde. If you’re using neither GNOME or KDE you can add a directive to your ~/.gtkrc-2.0:

gtk-cursor-blink = 0

If it is just the blinking rate that bugs you, then you can give a different value for gtk-cursor-blink. The value is given in milliseconds for the blink frequency.

If you wish to only change the settings in pidgin you can edit ~/.purple/gtkrc-2.0 instead of your main ~/.gtkrc-2.0.


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