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.

[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

[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.