Comments on: gnome-terminal cursor

By: chrishowie.com » Blog Archive » Website statistics

chrishowie.com » Blog Archive » Website statistics — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:03:18 +0000

[...] the most popular blog posts are not about my own projects. The most viewed one by far was a gripe about gnome-terminal. Seems many people have the same irritation that I [...]

By: hictio

hictio — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 20:58:50 +0000

A bit off topic maybe, but, personally, I do like it to blink, and I was looking for a way to convert the cursor on the console from the palsy ‘dash’ to a full block.
Do you happen to know a way to do that?

I love the way you can control that little, totally irrelevant things on FreeBSD

Thanks.

(Yes, I use the console a lot, since the Presario 1200 I’m using with Ununtu can only do 800×600, it is nearly as practical as the console -with a custom vga setting-

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:32:41 +0000

@FredW: Thanks for the directions. Note that doing this as root is a Bad Idea. Instead install the fakeroot package and add -rfakeroot to your build line.

@cpitch: Yeah, it sucks. Don’t bother with gconf. You won’t find anything useful.

By: cpitch

cpitch — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:14:05 +0000

Just reinstalled ubuntu8.04.. First thing I did was install all the patches.. rebooted.. now I noticed that the cursor blinks.. how annoying..

Didn’t do that before I rebooted and I could’ve swarn I could turn it off previously.

I know I’ll just check the help search blink.. click click click ah yes: (from the help page on this freshly patched system)

Allow bold text
Select this option to enable the terminal to display bold text.

Cursor blinks
Select this option to display a cursor that blinks.

Show menubar by default in new terminals
Select this option to show the menubar on new terminal windows.

So someone arbitrarily decided to remove this feature but it was left in the online help.. now.. what’s better, having a consolidated cursor blinking feature that irritates SOME users.. or having inconsistent help documentation..

Brilliant.. sigh, time to look at the gconf awfulness or perhaps the source code

By: FredW

FredW — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:15:29 +0000

I have never built a package from source, but this worked for me. I wanted to do all of this as root so all of these files would end up in the /root folder, since they are going to have root permissions. So I did the following.

sudo -i # so we will be in /root
apt-get install devscripts build-essential fakeroot # tools needed to do this
apt-get source gnome-terminal # program source
apt-get build-dep gnome-terminal # dependancies
wget http://www.chrishowie.com/files/gnome-terminal-stop-blinking-at-me.patch # get patch
cd /root/gnome-terminal-2.22.1 # goto source base diretory
patch -p1 < /root/gnome-terminal-stop-blinking-at-me.patch # apply patch
debuild -us -uc # build package
cd /root # back to root
dpkg -i gnome-terminal_2.22.1-0ubuntu2_i386.deb gnome-terminal-data_2.22.1-0ubuntu2_all.deb
# optional get rid of all gnome-terminal related files
rm -rf gnome-terminal*
exit

I never imagining patching a deb package would be so easy.
Thanks for the great work on the no-blink patch

By: atleta

atleta — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 13:32:52 +0000

Hi Chris,

I was afraid that this was the case. Nomen est omen… Gnome gets more and more, well, gnomish. I just upgraded my Debian (lenny/testing) and a few new gnome packages sneaked in and thus a lot of things breaked. The first thing I noticed was the irritating blinking block cursor. At first I thought that I just forgot where to turn it off (well, normally you turn it of once and then it remains like that between upgrades). Then I found that I was not able to arrange my 9 virtual desktops in a 3×3 grid. (The gnome guys blame brightside for this, but then why does it need an independent piece of software to be able to edge flip with my mouse?)

Anyway, thanks for the patch. Now that I know that I have to recompile, I think I’ll put it away for a while.

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 11 May 2008 23:08:35 +0000

@Hippy:

Yes, there is. But again, it is system-wide and for *all* text widgets, not just terminals.

(It is in fact the same value that the previously-discussed setting in the keyboard preferences adjusts.)

By: Hippy Randall

Hippy Randall — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:41:46 +0000

alt+F2 and type in “gconf-editor” (without the quotes) gives a lot of options. I think there are some to do with cursor blinking in the desktop section of the tree. Not sure if it’s what you are looking for but thought it was worth a mention.

By: Thomas Nybergh’s pages » Notes Archive » GNOME lunacy: missing setting for cursor blinks in Ubuntu 8.04’s gnome-terminal

Thu, 08 May 2008 15:39:03 +0000

[...] binary bundled with Ubuntu 8.04, it’s in the upstream version too. Luckily there’s at least one patch that removes this restriction. I’m sure I won’t take the time to roll my own patched gnome-terminal, but it’s [...]

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 11:13:03 +0000

Soo-Hyun Choi:

You also need to “sudo apt-get build-dep gnome-terminal” to install the required build dependencies.