I’m not sure when it happened, but yesterday and part of today I found myself in the company of a blinking cursor. Normally blinking cursors are not a big problem. The thing is, however, that when I’m writing code, or text in my favorite text editor, I want to know where the next character I type will land on the screen. With this blinking cursor, it seemed my mind started to blink in unison. Not very useful when trying to write.

Apperantly in a previous update, Vim (or probably the Terminal) started respecting the preferences for the blinking cursor. It could also be that I was experimenting with a setting for the $TERM environment variable. A few days ago I set it to gnome-256color which enabled 256 colors in the Terminal, which I tried to get for some time now.

Now how to get rid of this blinking cursor. Goto System > Preferences > Keyboard > General > Cursor Blinking. Uncheck the checkbox named Cursor blinks in text fields. This works in Ubuntu 10.10 and probably in other versions as well.