RFC: Disabling blinking cursor by default

[Mary Ellen Foster]

On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 1:27 PM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 01:21:47AM -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
>>On Fri, 2009-01-30 at 05:31 +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
>>> The blinking cursor causes the processor and GPU to be woken up
>>> frequently. On one of my test systems, this causes somewhere in the
>>> region of 2 Watts of extra power consumption. I'd like to change the
>>> default for this to false. Anyone have any objections?
>>>
>>
>>A slightly less drastical measure would be to set the
>>gtk-cursor-blink-timeout setting to some reasonable value of seconds:
>
> That works for Gnome, but what about vttys and other desktop environments?
>
> I'm not saying to not use the gtk thing, I'm just wondering if there is a
> toggle that would catch it globally somewhere.

Yes, this is an issue. I use KDE as a desktop but regularly run
several GTK apps including Firefox, Eclipse, and OpenOffice. A month
or so ago I tried -- and failed -- to find a way to turn off the
blinking cursor in these apps (due to issues with evil proprietary
graphics drivers) without manually running gnome-settings

MEF

-- 
Mary Ellen Foster  --  http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mef/
Informatik 6: Robotics and Embedded Systems, Technische Universität München
and ICCS, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh