Why does the cursor freeze in terminals?

Question

I've noticed that whenever I open a terminal the cursor blinks about 10 times and then freezes.

Is there a particular reason for this? What can the idea be?

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:25

2

This is not a bug, but a feature to save energy. Refer to this bug report on launchpad:

The cursor in active terminal window stops blinking after ten seconds.

You can even stop the cursor blinking, refer to this question to see how:

How do I disable the blinking cursor in gnome-terminal?

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:25

Community

1

answered Dec 29 '13 at 14:29

jobin

27,708

your answer hits the spot!! thanks :D ...saving energy is least to expect – 842Mono Dec 29 '13 at 14:44

some_stacker · Answer 2 · 2018-10-18T21:49:11.820

The previously provided answer to this question does not work in Xubuntu 18.04, where the cursor blinking timeout for GTK applications is apparently controlled by xfconf rather than dconf.

If you're a Xubuntu user, you can do the following to make the cursor keep blinking in GTK-based applications (which includes gnome-terminal, xfce4-terminal, gedit, pidgin and many others):

Open Settings Editor from the Settings menu.
Select the xsettings "channel" on the left side of the interface.
Click New.
The name of the property needs to be /Gtk/CursorBlinkTimeout
Set it to be an integer property.
Specify a large number (but less than 2 billion).
Click Save

Thank you for the answer but the question was simply "why". – 842Mono Oct 19 '18 at 07:29 — 842Mono, Oct 19 '18 at 07:29

Why does the cursor freeze in terminals?

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