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Can you configure the cursor in Eclipse to be a (possibly non-blinking) block, instead of a (blinking) bar?

I am running Xfce 4.10.

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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Eleno
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    Most applications control the appearance of the cursor within their windows. – Thomas Dickey Mar 09 '16 at 23:24
  • @ThomasDickey Therefore it is not a system-wide Accessibility option like in Microsoft Windows? – Eleno Mar 09 '16 at 23:49
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    This depends on the application. The window manager has nothing to say about that. There may be a central setting for e.g. all applications built with a specific set of GUI libraries (no matter what window manager you run them under) but not for applications while running under a specific window manager (no matter what GUI libraries the application uses). So what application are you interested in? – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Mar 09 '16 at 23:54
  • @Elena, the mention of a blinking underline sounds like a terminal emulator. Those all differ in how and what they can change. – Thomas Dickey Mar 10 '16 at 00:02
  • @Gilles I am interested in Eclipse. – Eleno Mar 10 '16 at 00:05
  • @ThomasDickey I am interested in GUI applications (text editors, in particular), not terminals. – Eleno Mar 10 '16 at 00:14
  • For `Eclipse`, that would be one of the preference settings within the program. – Thomas Dickey Mar 10 '16 at 00:21
  • @ThomasDickey Unfortunately, Eclipse offers no such option. You can choose to have a thick bar caret, and that's all. – Eleno Mar 10 '16 at 00:25
  • However, Eclipse is the one that controls the appearance of the cursor. So the answer to your question appears to be "no". (A lot of Eclipse's look and feel depends on platform and release - I'd compare notes but at hand have OSX which could differ). – Thomas Dickey Mar 10 '16 at 00:27
  • @ThomasDickey Then answer with a no, and I will choose your answer. – Eleno Mar 10 '16 at 00:31

3 Answers3

4

Short answer: no

Long:

From comments, OP clarified that the question was about Eclipse. The clue that the question was about the application's cursor (displayed as a part of the graphics within the window) rather than the desktop cursor was the comment about the blinking bar. Desktop cursor themes do not blink, and rarely are just a bar.

If Eclipse supported a change of cursor shape, that would be in one of the Preferences tabs, e.g., for the editor. OP does not find it there.

Web searches for the cursor shape in Eclipse only find comments that the shape is determined by whether you are in insert- or replace-mode. Seeing that, it appears that Eclipse does not allow this feature to be user-customized.

In a check with OSX, I see a feature in

  • General
  • Editors
  • Text Editors
  • Accessibility

as Use Custom Caret and Enable thick caret, which are both checked by default. But there is no check-box for blink.

Thomas Dickey
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Double click on "Smart Insert" and then again double click on "Smart Insert" in eclipse as shown in the image. You will get a non-blinking cursor.

This worked for me in eclipse on windows. No other OS settings were changed for doing this.

enter image description here

Stephen Rauch
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Ashish Jain
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  • Double-clicking on *Start Insert* changes the mode do *Overwrite*. It that mode you have a square cursor by default, but you are also overwriting text instead of inserting! So this answer does not work. – Lii Jan 17 '19 at 13:51
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As @Thomas Dickey has specified in his answer. No, there isn't. But, I have found a roundabout way of doing it on windows 10 and it works for me at least.

  1. You have to enable global block cursor in windows 10, by changing the cursor thickness under Cursor & pointer size settings and dragging the scrollbar to the right until you find the size suitable to your liking. You can also find the setting by directly typing "cursor & pointer" in the windows 10 search bar and clicking on the result that shows up.
  2. After doing that, Open Eclipse, go to Window > Preferences > General > Editors > Text Editors > Accessibility and disable the "use custom caret" in eclipse. You can also search for the settings in the preferences search bar by directly typing "Accessibility".

Doing this will disable eclipse's custom cursor and use the window's default. Thus, giving you the result that you desired(?).

Rui F Ribeiro
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cribaby
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