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I'm struggling to make the cursor in bash stop blinking. Also, the cursor in Iceweasel has started blinking again, but, for some reason, a lot slower than in bash :) I got those problems since I upgraded to sid, so probably some configuration files were overwritten.

I tried everything in How to stop cursor from blinking - nothing worked, probably because that was about tty, not bash.

This did not work (that is, setting the flags worked, just didn't do anything to the cursors):

gconftool --search-key cursor_blink
 /desktop/gnome/interface/cursor_blink = false
 /schemas/desktop/gnome/interface/cursor_blink = false

This did work, but only to make the cursor visible and invisible, it didn't stop the blink:

tput cvvis

This did not work:

echo -n -e '\e[?17;14;224c'
printf '\033[?12l'

My PS1 looks like this (added \033[?17;0;127c):

PS1="\033[?17;0;127c\\[$(tput setaf 3)\\]\u \\[$(tput setaf 4)\\]\w: \\[$(tput sgr0)\\]"

This is already set to zero:

/sys/class/graphics/fbcon/cursor_blink

Any more ideas?

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Emanuel Berg
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    bash has no say over cursor blink; it's up to the terminal emulator you're using. If sid is running GNOME 3 like wheezy is, the configuration is in dconf instead of gconf; I don't know what the new settings would be off the top of my head, though. – geekosaur Apr 22 '12 at 10:49
  • OK! I don't have dconf, and aptitude cannot install it because dpkg complains it cannot find ldconfig and start-stop-daemon. Those are unfamiliar to me, but an aptitude search did not show any results. Speaking of GNOME 3, do you know how to check what version I'm running? – Emanuel Berg Apr 22 '12 at 11:01
  • If you're logged in, ps -fu$USER | grep gnome-shell. Although that's imperfect as you could be in fallback mode, and as far as I've been able to determine GNOME ignores all its settings in that case. – geekosaur Apr 22 '12 at 11:05
  • There is no gnome-shell line but a gnome-terminal that looks like this: incal 2997 1 0 12:03 ? 00:00:04 gnome-terminal - Is that what you meant? You lost me :) – Emanuel Berg Apr 22 '12 at 11:16
  • No; gnome-shell is the fancy new GNOME 3 UI manager, replacing gnome-panel and a number of other independent programs used by GNOME 2. I don't know how to detect fallback mode, though — it looks like GNOME 2 except it seems to ignore settings. – geekosaur Apr 22 '12 at 11:21
  • I managed to install dconf. I didn't understand how to use it, so I installed dconf-tools instead. This uninstalled dconf. Then, with dconf-editor I navigated to org.gnome.desktop.interface where I was very happy to see that cursor-blink was indeed checked. But, disabling it didn't help out. Maybe it didn't work, because that is a GNOME 3 tool, and I'm on GNOME 2? Anyway, I mentioned earlier that aptitude didn't work: I solved that by editing my sudoers file, as they talk about here: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=390742 Also thanks for your efforts geekosaur – Emanuel Berg Apr 22 '12 at 12:12
  • I apparently managed to confuse you; if gnome-shell was not running then you did not want or need dconf. – geekosaur Apr 22 '12 at 12:14
  • OK! I removed dconf-tools and installed gnome-panel. Now it works! But everything looks completely different and it is slow as quicksand so I guess I got a lot of extras to go with it. Wow, that was some cursor blink fix! – Emanuel Berg Apr 22 '12 at 12:43

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