blinking cursor

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posted by HearHere at 11:18 AM on May 15 [1 favorite]

The first Notepad++ customization I looked up how to do was to stop the cursor from blinking.
posted by Lemkin at 11:35 AM on May 15 [2 favorites]

I prefer the blinking of the cursor. Lets me know the computer hasn't frozen, for one.
posted by grubi at 12:14 PM on May 15 [14 favorites]

I've been using computers since about 1981 and I don't think the blinking cursor has ever given me anything like an existential crisis.

Most of my work with the computer is in an art program and the mouse cursor doesn't blink; it does constantly change shape as I swap tools though.
posted by egypturnash at 12:31 PM on May 15 [4 favorites]

The blinking cursor is a perfect invention, which is why the one time that it's disconcerting is when an application loses focus but keeps blinking, so that now you have two blinking cursors on your screen.
posted by clawsoon at 12:48 PM on May 15 [6 favorites]

blink-cursor-blinks is a variable defined in ‘frame.el’.

Its value is 10

How many times to blink before using a solid cursor on NS, X, and MS-Windows.
Use 0 or negative value to blink forever.

And yet, and yet, the HTML blink tag was depreciated.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 1:13 PM on May 15 [7 favorites]

Insert Clever Name Here: And yet, and yet, the HTML blink tag was depreciated.

I once implemented the blink tag in javascript for an online typing game for my daughter, for precisely the reason of indicating clearly which letter to type next.
posted by clawsoon at 1:22 PM on May 15 [3 favorites]

Recently I learned that in Windows, the cursor will stop blinking after about six seconds, to free up a system timer. And it's always been this way, which was a little disconcerting because I've been using Windows for a long-ass time and I never noticed.

It's not true in all applications, of course, just ones that use the built-in OS text controls.
posted by zixyer at 2:08 PM on May 15 [1 favorite]

nitpick ahoy --- the article says that Jobs was unsuccessful in getting the original Mac's keyboard to ship without arrow keys. But the original Mac's keyboard had none. Every subsequent Mac keyboard intended for general use has had arrow keys, I'm pretty sure...
posted by Chef Flamboyardee at 2:11 PM on May 15 [1 favorite]

I'm pretty sure I remember a Steve Jobs quote where he was complaining that they added arrow keys after he was fired from Apple.
posted by zixyer at 2:25 PM on May 15 [1 favorite]

Funny enough, Jobs’s next company, NeXT, put arrow keys on the keyboard.
posted by ejs at 2:32 PM on May 15 [3 favorites]

Mice are terrible for indicating “I would like to move exactly one unit in this direction.” That’s what cursors are for, Woz you dingus.
posted by caviar2d2 at 2:37 PM on May 15 [3 favorites]

I've come to think ...

That mountain of elevated verbiage gave birth to a blinking mouse??
posted by jamjam at 2:37 PM on May 15 [1 favorite]

Recently I learned that in Windows, the cursor will stop blinking after about six seconds, to free up a system timer.

Yep. Relatedly: the Windows taskbar clock doesn't show seconds: 1, 2, 3.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 3:13 PM on May 15 [2 favorites]

On the first PC I owned, the flashing cursor drove me nuts. I found the schematic of the video card (text only!) and cut the trace that controled the flash. Only one of my geek friends noticed.
posted by Marky at 3:17 PM on May 15 [9 favorites]

I’ll take a blinking cursor over cursing at people not using their blinkers.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:03 PM on May 15 [5 favorites]

OK, so it was a hardware engineer and not a computer programmer, an invention and not a bug fix, and there was no existential crisis. This article is like one of those YouTube videos that has you watching all the way to the end to find the thumbnail that isn't in it. ★☆☆☆☆
posted by flabdablet at 4:48 PM on May 15 [22 favorites]

Paul Luna is a typography historian and emeritus professor at the University of Reading

Oh, come on. Really??
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 5:10 PM on May 15 [6 favorites]

That article made me mad. What bug? What existential crisis?
It’s not a bad article, it’s just titled incorrectly.
Nobody fixed a bug. There was no crisis.
posted by varion at 5:33 PM on May 15 [8 favorites]

I’m guessing the existential crisis is something like “writing is easy, you just stare at a blank page until your forehead bleeds” or some similar sentiment that implies you have no idea how to get ideas on a page without them effortfully springing fully formed from your brain like Athena from Zeus’ forehead, but yeah an actual description of the particular flavor a flashing cursor lends to an otherwise blank screen is kind of lacking here.
posted by egypturnash at 5:51 PM on May 15 [2 favorites]

Good story, terrible article.

I remember all nighters where I would start falling asleep in front of of the computer and would get this weird kind of tunnel vision where everything would become increasingly dark and blurry while the blinking green cursor would come into sharper and sharper focus, taking over my visual field. The frequency of the blink slowing down with every beat such that I could clearly see the instant turning on when the electron ray hit and the slow decay back into black. Every time, just as I about to resolve the individual phosphors on the CRT display, I would jerk awake in a state of apophenia verging on paranoia.

After the world moved to higher resolution color displays it took me years of practice to get the same feeling from bad psychedelic trips.
posted by Dr. Curare at 6:26 PM on May 15 [2 favorites]

Anybody who thinks a blinking cursor is an existential crisis has way too much spare time on their hands.
posted by Pouteria at 7:42 PM on May 15 [2 favorites]

I've got seconds showing on my Windows 11 taskbar.
posted by blue shadows at 7:43 PM on May 15 [2 favorites]

So the thing about the original Macintosh not having arrow keys was that it was kind of deliberately meant to force software developers to truly engage with the new UI paradigm — there was apparently some concern that people might port text-mode stuff to the Macintosh in a way that took no advantage of the unique characteristics of the UI that they'd worked so hard on, like the fact that it shipped with a mouse by default, which was unimaginable back then in the sort of way that, like, shipping a computer with a VR headset always included as a key system feature might feel today. And so in order to essentially force people to engage with the genuinely revolutionary graphical user interface (it was, after all, essentially the forebear of every single desktop computer interface in the world today, with a very obvious direct lineage), they shipped a first version of the computer that had a weird compromised keyboard in hopes of kind of laying the groundwork for the long-term strength of the platform as a whole.
posted by DoctorFedora at 10:57 PM on May 15 [4 favorites]

I've got seconds showing on my Windows 11 taskbar.

Same. I had to implement that once they got rid of the seconds above the calendar that pops up when you click the clock. I NEED MY SECONDS, MAN.
posted by grubi at 5:08 AM on May 16

When you write software, problems come up later that you would never imagine. One guy emailed me to say that he was getting petit mal seizures from the blinking text cursor of my word processor. (Apple had recently changed the system-provided text cursor.) Eventually Apple re-enabled the command line setting to turn the blink off, so I’m guessing he wasn’t the only one.
posted by jabah at 5:11 AM on May 16 [1 favorite]

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