How to Disable Cursor Blinking on Linux

Annoyed by the blinking cursor in your Linux terminal, editor or browser? Distracted by its metronome-like blinking from the work or fun at hand? Maybe you want limit screen activity and save battery life. Find out here how to disable cursor blinking on Linux ⤓ (Gnome and KDE) and restore your focus and sanity.

First, Now You See the Squi—

Faster than you can say Now you see the squirrel, it has disappeared behind a tree’s trunk, only to reappear moments later for another brief stint further up.

Squirrels climb trees not (as one might expect for a fast animal on the run) in a straight and direct fashion but spiraling around trunks for a much slower ascent. They do this, one can imagine, to only appear in that blinking, on again/off again/on again fashion that irritates and confuses potential predators.

Like a squirrel’s erratic appearance, the blinking cursor in a text field can both confuse and irritate. Let’s see if we can’t make it appear as a straight and direct line instead on Linux:

How to Disable Cursor Blinking on Linux

Disabling Cursor Blinking in Gnome Settings

Off in one blink of an eye?

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Disabling Cursor Blinking for KDE

To turn off cursor blinking in KDE Plasma and KDE applications:

1. Open the file ~/.config/kdeglobals in a text editor.
   Here’s why: This file holds the overall configuration for your KDE profile.
   Here’s how: You can open Konsole, for example, type pico ~/.config/kdeglobals and press Enter.
   Any editor: Every plain text editor works, of course, including KWrite, Vim and Emacs.
   
2. Look for the section headed [KDE].
   No “[KDE]”: If you do not see a [KDE] section, do add that line at the very bottom of the file:
   [KDE]
3. Add CursorBlinkRate=0 on a line of its own.
   Already there: If you do see a line that starts with CursorBlinkRate=, do change its value to 0 to disable cursor blinking.
   CursorBlinkRate: The CursorBlinkRate setting specifies the blinking interval in milliseconds or disables blinking with a value of 0.
   Example: A bare KDE section to turn off cursor blinking would be
   [KDE]
CursorBlinkRate=0
4. Save the file.
   

Disable Cursor Blinking in Konsole

To turn off cursor blinking in the Konsole terminal application specifically:

1. Open Konsole.
2. Click the hamburger menu icon.
3. Select Settings | Configure Konsole… from the menu that has appeared.
   Konsole keyboard shortcut: You can also press Ctrl Shift , (comma) to open Konsole settings.
4. Go to the Profiles section.
5. Highlight your custom profile.
   No custom profile: If you see only Built-in, click + New to add a new profile to Konsole; the default Built-in profile cannot be changed.
6. Click Edit.
7. Now go to the Appearance section.
8. Open the Cursor tab.
9. Turn off Enabled for Blinking:.
   
10. Click OK.
11. Now click OK agin.

A flavor of BSD: How to Turn Off Cursor Blinking on a Mac

How to Disable Cursor Blinking on Linux: FAQ

Will disabling cursor blinking also disable blinking on the terminal?

Yes.

If you disable cursor blinking in Gnome, KDE or another desktop environment, blinking will typically also be turned off in terminal appliations (such as Gnome Terminal, Console or Konsole.

No.

Outside the respective desktop environment, the console adheres to its own settings for cursor blinking, of course.

How do I disable cursor blinking in a non-graphical Linux terminal?

While there are escape sequences and hacks galore, your best bet for disabling cursor blinking on the Linux console is to create modified terminfo information for your user:

1. Use infocmp linux > ~/my-terminfo in the terminal to save a copy of the Linux terminal info to your user directory.
2. Edit the file to replace \E[?0c under cnorm with \E[?17;0;255c.
   Here’s where: Open terminfo in vi, for example: vi ~/my-terminfio.
   Here’s how: Search for cnorm, then make the change as above.
   Example: The cnorm section could read cnorm=\E[?25h\E[?17;0;255c .
3. Save the file.
4. Run tic ~/my-terminfo .
   Here’s why: This will compile the terminal information from the ~/my-terminfo file into compiled default information in the ~/.terminfo/ directory.
5. Delete the ~/my-terminfo file.

As an alternative, you can write 0 to the /sys/class/graphics/fbcon/cursor_blink file.

Can I turn off Gnome cursor blinking using the command line?

Yes.

To disable cursor blinking for the Gnome desktop environment from a terminal window:

• Enter and run the command gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-blink false.

(Tested with Gnome 47–49 and KDE Plasma 6; first published April 2025, last updated November 2025)