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On a text terminal, the cursor’s appearance is controlled by the
terminal, largely out of the control of Emacs. Some terminals offer
two different cursors: a “visible” static cursor, and a “very
visible” blinking cursor. By default, Emacs uses the very visible
cursor, and switches to it when you start or resume Emacs. If the
variable visible-cursor
is nil
when Emacs starts or
resumes, it uses the normal cursor.
On a graphical display, many more properties of the text cursor can
be altered. To customize its color, change the :background
attribute of the face named cursor
(see Face Customization). (The other attributes of this face have no effect;
the text shown under the cursor is drawn using the frame’s background
color.) To change its shape, customize the buffer-local variable
cursor-type
; possible values are box
(the default),
hollow
(a hollow box), bar
(a vertical bar), (bar
. n)
(a vertical bar n pixels wide), hbar
(a
horizontal bar), (hbar . n)
(a horizontal bar n
pixels tall), or nil
(no cursor at all).
To disable cursor blinking, change the variable
blink-cursor-mode
to nil
(see Easy Customization),
or add the line (blink-cursor-mode 0)
to your init file.
Alternatively, you can change how the cursor looks when it “blinks
off” by customizing the list variable blink-cursor-alist
.
Each element in the list should have the form (on-type
. off-type)
; this means that if the cursor is displayed as
on-type when it blinks on (where on-type is one of the
cursor types described above), then it is displayed as off-type
when it blinks off.
Some characters, such as tab characters, are “extra wide”. When
the cursor is positioned over such a character, it is normally drawn
with the default character width. You can make the cursor stretch to
cover wide characters, by changing the variable
x-stretch-cursor
to a non-nil
value.
The cursor normally appears in non-selected windows as a
non-blinking hollow box. (For a bar cursor, it instead appears as a
thinner bar.) To turn off cursors in non-selected windows, change the
variable cursor-in-non-selected-windows
to nil
.
To make the cursor even more visible, you can use HL Line mode, a minor mode that highlights the line containing point. Use M-x hl-line-mode to enable or disable it in the current buffer. M-x global-hl-line-mode enables or disables the same mode globally.
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