Cursor blink setting overwritten by shell integration

[zoriya]

Setting cursor-style-blink to false has virtually no effect because shell integration will automatically turn on blinking.

Here is the relevant snippet from zsh's shell integration.

      _ghostty_zle_line_init _ghostty_zle_line_finish _ghostty_zle_keymap_select() {
      case ${KEYMAP-} in
          # Blinking block cursor.
          vicmd|visual) builtin print -nu "$_ghostty_fd" '\e[1 q';;
          # Blinking bar cursor.
          *)            builtin print -nu "$_ghostty_fd" '\e[5 q';;
      esac
      }

I think the shell integration should:

• check for the blink config and not set blink if disabled, or
• use DEC mode 12 to set blink speratly from the cursor shape since DEC12 is ignored if cursor-style-blink is set.

PS: When suspending a tui (vim in my case) using ctrl-z, the cursor is not being changed by the shell integration idk why. Should I open another issue for this?

[mitchellh]

I'm not sure about this, so I converted it to a discussion to solicit more feedback.

Note that all of this can be disabled if you disable shell integration cursor handling with shell-integration-features = no-cursor.

[zoriya]

Yes but that disable the bar integration which i find pretty cool. Also since shell integration is enabled by default, changing cursor-style-blink does nothing so that's a bit weird.

I first created a post on discord to talk about this here before creating this issue.

[mitchellh]

Also since shell integration is enabled by default, changing cursor-style-blink does nothing so that's a bit weird.

The easy solution I'd accept today would be to update the docs to note this similar to how we note that behavior already for cursor-style.

The separation is exactly what I want more feedback on before committing anything.

[talvdav]

If shell integration is on by default and shell-integration-features = no-cursor is not set by default then any option that will not work should be marked so in the documentation and/or should trigger a warning on config reload.

But i also think that any option set in the config should be respected regardless of the shell integration status.

[samuelmasuy]

At least with Kitty and shell integration, when setting cursor_blink_interval 0, the behaviour is to check for the blink config and not set blink if disabled. I would personally like this behaviour, because I still want the shell integration for the cursor feature. Indeed, the cursor feature also changes the text cursor to a bar when editing shell command line.
On that note, the doc for shell-integration-features is a bit misleading since it does not talk about the feature I just referred to:

# Available features:
# 
#   * `cursor` - Set the cursor to a blinking bar at the prompt.

[cwegener]

I totally agree.

e.g. in my vimrc, my cursor is set to change to a bar when when in insert mode.
it would be awesome if ghostty did the same. right now in ghostty I have to chose between one of the two:

1. have the cursor on the zsh prompt change to a BLINKING bar when I am in insert mode AND have a BLINKING block cursor when in normal mode
2. disable a the cursor shell integration in ghostty altogether and always have a block cursor on the zsh prompt everywhere regardless of mode

at the moment, I have to chose option 2 until blinking is fixed ..

[magnusriga]

@cwegener Did you find a solution? I am facing the same exact issue.

[cwegener]

@magnusriga I am happily living with option 2 and have disabled cursor shell integration in zsh. my old terminal emulators never had cursor shell integration, so it's not really a feature that I'm missing.

[magnusriga]

Got it @cwegener . How are you able to tell if you are in Insert mode or Normal mode, if you always have a block cursor?

[nornagon]

Definitely very annoying not to have an easy way to turn off cursor blinking. It's counterintuitive that setting cursor-style-blink = false in the config seems to do nothing.

[denolfe]

I just ran into this and found it rather unintuitive as well. I would expect explicitly setting blink to false to be respected over anything else.

[rtfeldman]

I don't have a preference about how the setting should work, but I find blinking cursors really distracting (I seem to be abnormally easily distracted by motion compared to most people, at least based on talking to them; I also turn off all animated gifs in chat apps) and so the setting I was looking for was "never blink the cursor under any circumstances."

I actually didn't know zsh had any say in that!

I used shell-integration-features = no-cursor from this post below (thanks!) but was disappointed to see that now I get a block cursor instead of the nice thin bar. It doesn't blink, so I'll keep using it that way, but I'd love a non-blinking bar if there's some way to get it!

[thiagowfx]

Richard: set cursor-style = bar as well

[rtfeldman]

Beautiful, that brought it back - thank you! 😃

[b11e]

I find that the shell-integration-features = no-cursor setting doesn't stick.
Does it go back to blinking for you guys after some time?

[thiagowfx]

I use grml-zsh-config. When opening Ghostty, it starts with a bar+blinking cursor(1).

When spawning a new zsh shell within zsh, it changes to a block+non-blocking cursor(2).

(2) is the desired behavior – iTerm2 and Terminal.app both do it out-of-the-box. I am not sure why Ghostty sets a bar+blinking cursor, whilst the other terminal emulators do not.

This discussion / issue seems to track down the root cause. I would suggest converting it back to an Issue. Happy to provide logs and/or more info if it helps!

[thiagowfx]

Workaround to achieve (2):

cursor-style-blink = false
shell-integration-features = no-cursor

Source: #3836

[cbrunnkvist]

Oh man, I was THIS close to opening another Issue for "Config file isn't working at all on macOS"
because the first thing I decided needed changing upon first launch was the incessant blinking and indistinct "|" style cursor(1):

cursor-style-blink = false
cursor-style=block

Anyway, it turns out the issue was the shell integration (whatever it means) and the workaround suggested above, worked.

I also would like to note that the "Ghostty > Reload configuration" menu option doesn't reset the currently open terminal an/or reapply the shell-integration-features setting. This is another reason I thought it was completely ignoring the config file - there's no logging or anything, not even if I make typos in the config.

(1): I've never seen that in an interactive prompt where the cursor is nominally at the end of data - in a word processor, yes okay, because the nature of text editing is completely different there

[jessejanderson]

Just chiming in to say I also thought this was broken since it was the first thing I noticed and tried to configure.

While admittedly a very minor thing (and simple enough to fix), it was a pretty sour start to trying out something new. Call me fickle, but had I not discovered this thread I might have just been annoyed enough to remove the app and switch back to my old terminal app without giving ghostty a fair shake. 🙃

Definitely something that should—at the very least—be mentioned in the docs next to the cursor-style and/or cursor-style-blink info.

[b11e]

Edit: ok it only blinks inside tmux now.
Edit2: i forgot to kill tmux-server and then restart 🤦‍♂️

I don't know what's going but it still blinks even with
shell-integration-features = no-cursor
it works only temporarily when it does (i have to quit and restart) then I come back to ghostty later and it's blinking again.
Most times I reload and restart, it just sits there blinking and it's driving me up a wall.

running tmux + nvim + ghossty
config:

font-thicken = true
font-size = 26
cursor-style = block
cursor-style-blink = false
cursor-invert-fg-bg = true
shell-integration-features = no-cursor

[risico]

Same here, although not sure if it is a similar issue, my cursor starts to blink after I enter nvim from within tmux, and then it keeps blinking even after I quit nvim. If I go into nvim without tmux then no blink, so I am not sure how nvim triggers the blink just in tmux.

But yeah, +1 on having cursor-style-blink just say hard no to any blinking anywhere.

[00-kat]

Neovim doesn't seem to reset the cursor blink state when you exit, and Tmux doesn't have shell integration. At least, that's my guess as to what this is.

[risico]

I am not sure what config in nvim deals with that? My cursor is set to be block in all modes even.

[00-kat]

guicursor I think.

[gaoxiaoliangz]

Any update on this? I want to have shell-integration-features = cursor to show the zsh vi mode status, but also keep the cursor from blinking. I set cursor-style-blink = false but the cursor still blinks.

[chris4prez]

This is how I would like it to also work too. I want shell integration for cursor but want to disable blink which I find very distracting

[barrett-ruth]

Same! Anyone know how we can make this happen? The settings below basically imply that a cursor shell integration must mean blinking - i.e. that there are no other special cursor behaviors a shell may have.

So not only should this issue be resolved (I feel that we have a non-default behavior as default) the structure of the settings should also be refactored.

[thecsw]

If you're using fish, at the very least you can put set fish_cursor_unknown block in your config.fish.

[00-kat]

Also: if you use Vi mode, a few other variables are: fish_cursor_insert fish_cursor_visual fish_cursor_default fish_cursor_replace fish_cursor_unknown fish_cursor_external fish_cursor_replace_one fish_cursor_selection_mode (and these variables are also mentioned over here).

You may need one of these too (until Fish v4 which adds Ghostty to the allowlist):

if status is-interactive
    if string match -q -- '*ghostty*' $TERM
        set -g fish_vi_force_cursor 1
    end
end

[barrett-ruth]

Fully functional zsh solution (vi mode support), requiring no ghostty setting updates:

function __set_beam_cursor {
    echo -ne '\e[6 q'
}

function __set_block_cursor {
    echo -ne '\e[2 q'
}

function zle-keymap-select {
  case $KEYMAP in
    vicmd) __set_block_cursor;;
    viins|main) __set_beam_cursor;;
  esac
}
zle -N zle-keymap-select

function zle-line-init {
    __set_beam_cursor
}
zle -N zle-line-init

precmd() {
    __set_beam_cursor  # doesn't have to be in precmd - can put outside a function if you like
}

[magnusriga]

+1, that worked. Thank you!

@barrett-ruth Is it necessary to set the cursor in both precmd and zle-line-init, would not one of them suffice? From the ZSH docs:

precmd
Executed before each prompt. Note that precommand functions are not re-executed simply because the command line is redrawn, as happens, for example, when a notification about an exiting job is displayed.

zle-line-init
Executed every time the line editor is started to read a new line of input.

Also, re. precmd, should we not append to the hook function, instead of re-defining precmd (since it might be used elsewhere), like this:

builtin typeset -ag precmd_functions
precmd_functions+=(__set_beam_cursor)