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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.

Bonus related tip

If you’re really driven mad by the blinking cursor, and wish to disable it in the console too then add the next little snippet to your shell’s startup file:

echo -e '\033[?48c'

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