Arch Linux

tlat

Member

Registered: 2019-11-25

Posts: 12

[SOLVED] Vertical dots text input cursor

Are there any GTK3 cursor themes where the text input cursor animation is a dotted or dashed vertical line instead of a solid line?

I'm looking for a text cursor that has either dots or vertical hyphens and is animated whereby each character disappears in sequence going up like a barber shop pole. The blinking cursor is annoying.

•
•
•
•

|
|
|
|

Last edited by tlat (2019-11-25 09:45:28)

tlat

Member

Registered: 2019-11-25

Posts: 12

Re: [SOLVED] Vertical dots text input cursor

Or is there at least a way to make the cursor fade from black to light gray and back instead of it fading to transparency?

schard

Forum Moderator

From: Hannover

Registered: 2016-05-06

Posts: 2,700

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Vertical dots text input cursor

The text input cursor in a TTY is one character only.
I could not find a set of characters, that would meet your requirements in UTF-8.
Furthermore I am not sure, whether the usual shells actually support a sequence of multiple characters as a text input cursor.

---

Inofficial first vice president of the Rust Evangelism Strike Force

tlat

Member

Registered: 2019-11-25

Posts: 12

Re: [SOLVED] Vertical dots text input cursor

Thanks for the reply. This would be for Firefox and other GTK3 applications.

In the Atom editor you can override the cursor with CSS. Is it possible to override the text input cursor animation in a GTK3 theme?

This Atom CSS alternate-fades the color from black to yellow and back:
https://discuss.atom.io/t/a-color-switc … atom/41586

atom-text-editor.editor .cursor {
  border-color: black; // may be the color you want
  transition: border-color .4s;
}

atom-text-editor.editor .cursors.blink-off .cursor {
  opacity: 1;
  border-color: yellow;  // may be the color you want
  transition: border-color .4s;
}

Last edited by tlat (2019-11-25 09:30:22)

schard

Forum Moderator

From: Hannover

Registered: 2016-05-06

Posts: 2,700

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Vertical dots text input cursor

Ah, okay. I was thinking of the input cursor in a terminal emulator.
Then you should look for "GTK cursor themes". I know of none, but there even is a Wiki page for this topic.

---

Inofficial first vice president of the Rust Evangelism Strike Force

tlat

Member

Registered: 2019-11-25

Posts: 12

Re: [SOLVED] Vertical dots text input cursor

I'm not sure if the text input cursor is part of GTK3 itself or the theme. GTK3 has cursor blink settings for timeout and time but not line border-style.

https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable … nk-timeout

tlat

Member

Registered: 2019-11-25

Posts: 12

Re: [SOLVED] Vertical dots text input cursor

Solution: `gdk_cursor_new_from_pixmap` and `gdk_window_set_cursor`

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/212 … text-caret

It looks like this can only be done by editing source code of the apps themselves.

Last edited by tlat (2019-11-25 09:41:19)

tlat

Member

Registered: 2019-11-25

Posts: 12

Re: [SOLVED] Vertical dots text input cursor

GTK3 documentation for changing the cursor: https://developer.gnome.org/gdk3/stable … rsors.html