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I want to change my terminal cursor symbol to a blinking, orange "lambda-sign", how can I do that? I don't want to change PS1 or anything at the prompt, but the cursor shape and behaviour itself.

Google wasn't a real help with this issue.

I am using yakuake-term, but I would want to change every cursor I can find on my system to the blinking lambda sign / any unicode character.

Eisenhans
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1 Answers1

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According to a KDE page

Yakuake is a drop-down terminal emulator based on KDE Konsole technology.

In other words, it uses Konsole. The source-code for Konsole in Enumeration.h defines three cursor styles for the terminal:

enum CursorShapeEnum {
    /** Use a solid rectangular block to draw the cursor. */
    BlockCursor     = 0,
    /** Use an 'I' shape, similar to that used in text editing
     * applications, to draw the cursor.
     */
    IBeamCursor     = 1,
    /** Draw a line underneath the cursor's position. */
    UnderlineCursor = 2
};

Unlike other terminals (see How to change the cursor theme in CLI?), Konsole controls its cursor shape (as well as whether the cursor blinks) via profiles. You can change profiles via a dialog. Konsole also (see How to set cursor to blinking in Konsole from script or vim?) recognizes an escape sequence which alters profile settings.

For example, this sets it to the block cursor:

printf "\033]50;CursorShape=0\007"

None of the enumerated choices supported by Konsole are "orange "lamda-sign"".

Other terminal emulators have different methods for setting the cursor shape. Very few (if any) provide a character for the text-cursor.

Most terminal emulators in X provide a mouse pointer, also referred to as a cursor theme. You can set almost any image for those (even colored). But those do not blink. See for example

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Thomas Dickey
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