re blinking cursor in xterm in may ims com tonyf ims com antonio freixas writes in article may taylor uucp mark taylor uucp mark a davis writes oh boy have i wanted this too however i believe that the cursor will be under the server s control could be wrong on an xterminal for example if the server was not the one controlling the cursor then trying to get the xterm application to do the blinking would cause needless and yucky network overhead consistantly most people who write cursor blinking code just implement the simple case a straight msec or so on off cycle however the cursor will work much better if cursor blinking is suppressed i e the cursor is made visible any time the cursor moves and for to sec thereafter if you don t do this the cursor will be hard to track when in motion you allways could port and use emu from export lcs mit edu contrib emu tar z we ve implemented a blinking text cursor for the very reasons people mentioned you can even configure the actual size of the text cursor horizontal ver tical line cursors smaller block cursors turn on and off blinking set the blink rate and so on you even get blinking text ok enough advertising i haven t looked at the xterm code in this respect but from the memories i have when we had to decide whether to start with xterm and make it do what we wanted mostly the blinking text i d say it won t be easy since xterm is a hairy mess understandable if you follow it s roots back to x the actual task to get the cursor to blink isn t that difficult if you provide the right hooks as antonio mentioned you ll have to show the cursor directly after it has moved or people will become confused since it s a good idea to take the cursor off the screen when you do anything on screen anyways this isn t very complicated you ll just have to start the blink process with the cursor showing directly after it s mapped as for the portability of emu and it s newest version the one on export is still the same as on the r contrib tape we wanted to get out a new release for over six months now but unfortunately we re drowning in work but since the changes aren t affectiong emu s behavior much i d say whoever wants to try emu shouldn t wait for a new version as is emu won t work on bsd derived systems e g suns with anything else than a csh there is a fix to this which is very short remove one line of code i ll put this on export today michael michael elbel digital pcs gmbh muenchen germany me dude pcs com intelligenz is sowieso nur wat fuer doofe mia fermentation fault coors dumped
