How to Disable Blinking Cursors
The article provides a guide on how to disable blinking cursors in various environments, including terminal emulators, text editors, browsers, and the X Window System, offering specific configuration examples for tools like Alacritty, VS Code, and Firefox.
Background
Most terminal emulators and text editors use a blinking cursor by default — a tiny rectangle or vertical line that flashes on and off to show your insertion point. For many programmers, sysadmins, and writers who spend hours in terminals (command-line environments like xterm, Alacritty, Kitty, or tmux), that blink is a persistent visual distraction that can cause eye strain, fatigue, or even trigger migraines and seizures in sensitive users. This article is a practical reference: it collects the configuration commands and file edits needed to disable blinking cursors across dozens of terminals, editors (Vim, Emacs, Nano), multiplexers (tmux, screen), and windowing systems (X11, Wayland, Windows, macOS). There is no single standard — each program has its own syntax — so users often search for this information piecemeal. The page serves as a centralized, copy-paste-ready cheat sheet that saves time for developers and power users who want a static, always-visible cursor.