How to turn off gnome-terminal's cursor blinking
For the purposes of turning off the irritating blinking cursor, there are three generations of gnome-terminal
(so far; the Gnome people may yet change their minds again), each of
them with a different way to do this. So it goes like this:
- in the original version of
gnome-terminal, there is a direct preference
for this; in the General tab of each profile there is a 'Cursor blinks'
option.
- in the intermediate version of
gnome-terminal, there is no option
in gnome-terminal to control this; you have to turn it off by
turning off a general Gnome setting. In the General tab of the
Keyboard preferences (System → Preferences →
Keyboard), turn off 'Cursor blinks in text fields'.
(Yes, this is obscure. Apparently terminals are 'text fields' nowadays,
at least to Gnome.)
This has the side effect of disabling blinking cursors everywhere
in Gnome, including in your web browser. Since I spend a lot more
time in gnome-terminal than filling in forms in my browser and
I absolutely hate blinking cursors in terminal windows, this is a
tradeoff that I reluctantly live with.
- in the modern version of
gnome-terminal, there is a hidden
gconf setting that controls this
if you don't want to turn off the Gnome-wide setting. Fire up
gconf-editor,
navigate to apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default, and set the
cursor_blink_mode key to have the value of 'off'. If you
have any other profiles, you will have to create and set this key
in them as well.
(It probably will be inherited by any new profile that you create
after making this change, but I haven't tested this; all of my
profiles are old.)
In terms of what distribution has what version of
gnome-terminal: Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 6.06 LTS have the original
version, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS has the intermediate version, and Fedora 10 has
the modern version. Only the original version pays attention to the
preference it sets; the other two versions silently ignore it.
(See this Gnome bug
and its links for the history. This Ubuntu bug
has more than enough comments that summarize my view on the whole
situation.)