13 ms·

Blinking Cursor Turns 54

81 points by elvis70 5y ago

odiroot 5y ago
If you also dislike this: https://jurta.org/en/prog/noblink https://jurta.org/en/prog/noblink
pseingatl 5y ago
I miss nbtsr (no blink terminate and stay resident). Wish there was something for modern OS's.
- rwallace 5y ago
  Thankfully, you can turn off cursor blinking on Windows (by turning the blink rate down to zero).
tpmx 5y ago
I've been using Emacs since 1996. One of the many reasons I like it is the default non-blinking full block cursor. It brings a certain calmness to the editing process. No stress or distraction. It feels so clean. It's interesting how very subtle design decisions like these matter so much.
- dang 5y ago
  Is that the default? The cursor in my Emacs blinks and I don't believe I told it to. Edit: M-x blink-cursor-mode FTW - thanks!
  - tpmx 5y ago
    Uh, please clarify? :) I do believe it is the default. Hard to know what's default when you've been carrying over your .emacs for two decades. Every single fresh install on random throwaway installs I've done has defaulted to a single non-blinking block cursor though.
    - gmfawcett 5y ago
      It's easy -- just run "emacs -q" to bypass all your local config. Default in GUI is a blinking cursor. (Default in terminal is the terminal's own blink default.)
      - tpmx 5y ago
        > Default in GUI is a blinking cursor. (Default in terminal is the terminal's own blink default.) Ah, that probably explains my confusion. Sorry about spreading it.
- Teckla 5y ago
  I prefer a blinking cursor, otherwise I often find it hard to find the cursor on the screen. Also prefer block cursor to underline cursor for the same reason.
  - csdvrx 5y ago
    On Windows Terminal and others, I think you can use a non standard color (example: red, pink...) which should help you easily locate it.
- a_e_k 5y ago
  Emacs has a lot of cool little touches to the way it blinks the cursor. blink-cursor-delay (defaults to 0.5 seconds): Keeps the cursor visible and not blinking when you're rapidly navigating around or typing. Most other apps seem to do this sort of thing too, but it's an easy detail to overlook. blink-cursor-blinks (defaults to 10): Blinks the cursor a certain number of times and then stops blinking. One way I do customize it is to set blink-cursor-alist to '((t . hollow)). When the cursor blinks it alternates between a full block and the outline of a block so that it never disappears completely.
- morelisp 5y ago
  Emacs does blink by default. On the other hand, it is the only piece of software I know with `blink-cursor-blinks` - which is I think 10 by default, I've reduced it to 3 - so the cursor blinks only a couple times and then stops.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- anon_123g987 5y ago
  Blinking can be disabled in RStudio, too, though it's not the default. I know this because RStudio doesn't respect my XFCE settings, where blinking can also be disabled, or the blinking-rate set (almost) OS-wide.
- perihelions 5y ago
  My perception is the opposite: it's stressful to see a non-blinking block cursor, because that's what emacs looks like when it locks up. Frozen cursors are the very first visible indication. Switching to a "calm" cursor, to me, would feel a bit like an Apple user setting their default mouse cursor to a pinwheel of doom [0]. (Background: emacs is a single-threaded lisp program, and "blink the cursor" is just another lisp function [1] running on an event timer. (At least that's the case in GTK emacs). So if any lisp function hard-crashes, the cursor will immediately crash too). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_pinwheel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_pinwheel [1] https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/emacs-28/lisp/frame.el#L2644 https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/emacs-28/lisp/fra...
csdvrx 5y ago
Interestingly enough, disabling cursor blinks on the intel 950 iGPUs resulted in increased powersaving: https://lwn.net/Articles/317922/ https://lwn.net/Articles/317922/ and http://tuxdiary.com/2015/09/29/save-battery-intel-linux/ http://tuxdiary.com/2015/09/29/save-battery-intel-linux/ A few years later, I checked that with powertop when I was using my thinkpad in uni and it was true and measurable! I'm not sure if it's still the case, but it's funny how UI features can tax the power budget in unsuspected ways.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  And moving your mouse around made Windows 95 faster! https://www.extremetech.com/computing/294907-why-moving-the-mouse-in-windows-95-made-the-os-faster https://www.extremetech.com/computing/294907-why-moving-the-...
  - chhickman 5y ago
    You can still observe a related effect to this in Windows 10. Open up any large(ish) file in NotePad++ or most any other editor and place the cursor in the text and drag to the bottom of the screen so it starts scrolling. If you hold the mouse still at that point it will scroll through a couple dozen every half second or so, but if you wag the mouse side to side it will scroll through hundreds at a time in the same span.
    - jareklupinski 5y ago
      every time I use this trick, I think of how running diagonally in some games is faster than running in one direction...
      - badRNG 5y ago
        I think that's just because those games are written poorly and don't account for the differences in moving diagonally. If you are moving on a grid, moving forward one tile moves you the length of a tile. Moving diagonally one tile moves you sqrt(2) ~1.4 tile lengths.
TonyRobbins 5y ago
TonyRobbins 5y ago
bokchoi 5y ago
The hackaday article doesn't add much. The actual article is: https://www.inverse.com/innovation/blinking-cursor-history https://www.inverse.com/innovation/blinking-cursor-history
- JdeBP 5y ago
  ... and the history professor from the University of Reading has the history wrong. As I wrote at https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/11032/1932 https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/11032/1932 , whilst Charles S. Kiesling's patent was filed in August 1967, the blinking cursor had actually been around since at least the Datanet-760 from General Electric coming out in 1965. The patent filing date is not its birth date. It has not turned 54 this year.
bitwize 5y ago
Good old blinking cursors, one of those computing things that are almost invisible until they're missing. The MAME emulation of the Tandy 2000 is reasonably complete. I get the feeling that it was barely worked on until Windows 1.0 for the 2000 turned up, then there was a flurry of activity to get that working. The reason is because while the system is mostly emulated, one critical component is not: the display board's support for a hardware blinking cursor. As a result, if you're navigating a word processing document in, say, WordStar, you're largely doing so blind. Only programs with a soft cursor (like GW-BASIC in graphic mode) work like they should.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
SLWW 5y ago
I love the blinking cursor; the only time i have reason to revile it's existence was with the late Terry Davis' Temple OS. Though with a quick Kernel patch you can slow it down. I just know that if the cursor blinks faster than what we are used to, I find it causes anxiety and is greatly distracting.
abecedarius 5y ago
The popularity is strange to me. (In this comment thread: "good old blinking cursor", blinking as default, and the reason to change the default not being that anyone hates it but just to save power.) It's like it's jumping up and down yelling "look at me, look at me!", tirelessly. Who can think with that going on? I guess this is not a neurotypical reaction.
JdeBP 5y ago
As I wrote at https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/11032/1932 https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/11032/1932 Charles A. Kiesling is the best that my research turns up, but xe might not have been the first. More importantly, however, and also as I wrote there, the blinking cursor has existed since at least 1965, and has not just turned 54 this year.

81 points by elvis70 5y ago

odiroot 5y ago

If you also dislike this: https://jurta.org/en/prog/noblink https://jurta.org/en/prog/noblink

pseingatl 5y ago

I miss nbtsr (no blink terminate and stay resident). Wish there was something for modern OS's.

rwallace 5y ago
Thankfully, you can turn off cursor blinking on Windows (by turning the blink rate down to zero).

tpmx 5y ago

I've been using Emacs since 1996. One of the many reasons I like it is the default non-blinking full block cursor. It brings a certain calmness to the editing process. No stress or distraction. It feels so clean. It's interesting how very subtle design decisions like these matter so much.

dang 5y ago
Is that the default? The cursor in my Emacs blinks and I don't believe I told it to. Edit: M-x blink-cursor-mode FTW - thanks!
- tpmx 5y ago
  Uh, please clarify? :) I do believe it is the default. Hard to know what's default when you've been carrying over your .emacs for two decades. Every single fresh install on random throwaway installs I've done has defaulted to a single non-blinking block cursor though.
  - gmfawcett 5y ago
    It's easy -- just run "emacs -q" to bypass all your local config. Default in GUI is a blinking cursor. (Default in terminal is the terminal's own blink default.)
    - tpmx 5y ago
      > Default in GUI is a blinking cursor. (Default in terminal is the terminal's own blink default.) Ah, that probably explains my confusion. Sorry about spreading it.
Teckla 5y ago
I prefer a blinking cursor, otherwise I often find it hard to find the cursor on the screen. Also prefer block cursor to underline cursor for the same reason.
- csdvrx 5y ago
  On Windows Terminal and others, I think you can use a non standard color (example: red, pink...) which should help you easily locate it.
a_e_k 5y ago
Emacs has a lot of cool little touches to the way it blinks the cursor. blink-cursor-delay (defaults to 0.5 seconds): Keeps the cursor visible and not blinking when you're rapidly navigating around or typing. Most other apps seem to do this sort of thing too, but it's an easy detail to overlook. blink-cursor-blinks (defaults to 10): Blinks the cursor a certain number of times and then stops blinking. One way I do customize it is to set blink-cursor-alist to '((t . hollow)). When the cursor blinks it alternates between a full block and the outline of a block so that it never disappears completely.
morelisp 5y ago
Emacs does blink by default. On the other hand, it is the only piece of software I know with `blink-cursor-blinks` - which is I think 10 by default, I've reduced it to 3 - so the cursor blinks only a couple times and then stops.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
anon_123g987 5y ago
Blinking can be disabled in RStudio, too, though it's not the default. I know this because RStudio doesn't respect my XFCE settings, where blinking can also be disabled, or the blinking-rate set (almost) OS-wide.
perihelions 5y ago
My perception is the opposite: it's stressful to see a non-blinking block cursor, because that's what emacs looks like when it locks up. Frozen cursors are the very first visible indication. Switching to a "calm" cursor, to me, would feel a bit like an Apple user setting their default mouse cursor to a pinwheel of doom [0]. (Background: emacs is a single-threaded lisp program, and "blink the cursor" is just another lisp function [1] running on an event timer. (At least that's the case in GTK emacs). So if any lisp function hard-crashes, the cursor will immediately crash too). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_pinwheel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_pinwheel [1] https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/emacs-28/lisp/frame.el#L2644 https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/emacs-28/lisp/fra...

csdvrx 5y ago

Interestingly enough, disabling cursor blinks on the intel 950 iGPUs resulted in increased powersaving: https://lwn.net/Articles/317922/ https://lwn.net/Articles/317922/ and http://tuxdiary.com/2015/09/29/save-battery-intel-linux/ http://tuxdiary.com/2015/09/29/save-battery-intel-linux/ A few years later, I checked that with powertop when I was using my thinkpad in uni and it was true and measurable! I'm not sure if it's still the case, but it's funny how UI features can tax the power budget in unsuspected ways.

newsbinator 5y ago
And moving your mouse around made Windows 95 faster! https://www.extremetech.com/computing/294907-why-moving-the-mouse-in-windows-95-made-the-os-faster https://www.extremetech.com/computing/294907-why-moving-the-...
- chhickman 5y ago
  You can still observe a related effect to this in Windows 10. Open up any large(ish) file in NotePad++ or most any other editor and place the cursor in the text and drag to the bottom of the screen so it starts scrolling. If you hold the mouse still at that point it will scroll through a couple dozen every half second or so, but if you wag the mouse side to side it will scroll through hundreds at a time in the same span.
  - jareklupinski 5y ago
    every time I use this trick, I think of how running diagonally in some games is faster than running in one direction...
    - badRNG 5y ago
      I think that's just because those games are written poorly and don't account for the differences in moving diagonally. If you are moving on a grid, moving forward one tile moves you the length of a tile. Moving diagonally one tile moves you sqrt(2) ~1.4 tile lengths.

TonyRobbins 5y ago

bokchoi 5y ago

The hackaday article doesn't add much. The actual article is: https://www.inverse.com/innovation/blinking-cursor-history https://www.inverse.com/innovation/blinking-cursor-history

JdeBP 5y ago
... and the history professor from the University of Reading has the history wrong. As I wrote at https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/11032/1932 https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/11032/1932 , whilst Charles S. Kiesling's patent was filed in August 1967, the blinking cursor had actually been around since at least the Datanet-760 from General Electric coming out in 1965. The patent filing date is not its birth date. It has not turned 54 this year.

bitwize 5y ago

Good old blinking cursors, one of those computing things that are almost invisible until they're missing. The MAME emulation of the Tandy 2000 is reasonably complete. I get the feeling that it was barely worked on until Windows 1.0 for the 2000 turned up, then there was a flurry of activity to get that working. The reason is because while the system is mostly emulated, one critical component is not: the display board's support for a hardware blinking cursor. As a result, if you're navigating a word processing document in, say, WordStar, you're largely doing so blind. Only programs with a soft cursor (like GW-BASIC in graphic mode) work like they should.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

SLWW 5y ago

I love the blinking cursor; the only time i have reason to revile it's existence was with the late Terry Davis' Temple OS. Though with a quick Kernel patch you can slow it down. I just know that if the cursor blinks faster than what we are used to, I find it causes anxiety and is greatly distracting.

abecedarius 5y ago

The popularity is strange to me. (In this comment thread: "good old blinking cursor", blinking as default, and the reason to change the default not being that anyone hates it but just to save power.) It's like it's jumping up and down yelling "look at me, look at me!", tirelessly. Who can think with that going on? I guess this is not a neurotypical reaction.

JdeBP 5y ago

As I wrote at https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/11032/1932 https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/11032/1932 Charles A. Kiesling is the best that my research turns up, but xe might not have been the first. More importantly, however, and also as I wrote there, the blinking cursor has existed since at least 1965, and has not just turned 54 this year.