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Blinking text input cursors are a historical curiosity of computer engineering (similar to the QWERTY keyboard layout). Most people don't care (about a lot of stuff in general), but some do.

For me non-blinking, i.e. static, text input cursors are a quality of life improvement.

Since ages I have this bookmark to an old-school webpage that provides a lot of information regarding multiple ways of getting rid of blinking cursors:

This page is good, but contains much stuff I don't need (and some seems also outdated).

Below I list the settings / modifications that I needed to do on my Linux (Debian / Ubuntu) machines for not being driven into madness by some tiny flashing square my screen.

echo 0 | sudo tee /sys/class/graphics/fbcon/cursor_blink

(TODO: one can also pass some parameter at boot, or alter some setting in systemd to make it permanent...)

about:config -> Create new setting: ui.caretBlinkTime (Integer):

ui.caretBlinkTime = 0

Depends on the graphical backend. Below setting applies to the libreoffice-qt backend.

File: ~/.qt/qtrc

[General]

cursorFlashTime=0

I need this for my beloved ds9.

File: ~/.Xdefaults

! no blinking cursor in ds9 (Tcl/TK)

*insertOffTime: 0

KDE Terminal Emulator.

Configuration via mouse clicks. (If menu not active, default short-cut is "Ctrl-Shift-M".)

Settings -> Edit Current Profile -> Appearance (Page) -> Cursor (Tab) -> Un-tick "Blinking enabled".

Modern Terminal Emulator.

File: ~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf

cursor_blink_interval 0

>: The interval (in seconds) at which to blink the cursor. Set to zero

>: to disable blinking. Negative values mean use system default. Note

>: that numbers smaller than repaint_delay will be limited to

>: repaint_delay.

> cursor_stop_blinking_after 15.0

>: Stop blinking cursor after the specified number of seconds of

>: keyboard inactivity. Set to zero to never stop blinking.

As you see, I go hardcore here and have it never blinking at all. However, you could adjust it also in such a way, that it blinks only for some seconds.

File: ~/.emacs

(blink-cursor-mode 0)

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