Trying to understand cursor style

[nickzelei]

Hi there,

Trying to make sense of the cursor style. I am using zsh and have a pretty bare setup on an M1 Max MBP Sequoia 15.1.1.

Coming from iTerm2, my cursor was set by default (I believe?) to unblinking box cursor.
I noticed in Ghostty that my cursor is set to blinking vertical bar.

I set out to change that as I prefer the solid box.

I tried setting the following settings:

cursor-style = box
cursor-style-blink = false

Reloaded ghostty, reloaded config, however these options seem to be being completely ignored.

Based on what I've read about the shell integration, I found the following settings ultimately get me what I want, but it's unclear to me as to why this accomplishes this:

cursor-style-blink = false
shell-integration-features = no-cursor

What about turning off the cursor shell integration feature sets the default to block (maybe this is the ghostty default if there is no shell-integration?)

I think as a user I would have expected that regardless of the shell integration, setting the cursor style in the settings would have overridden this as otherwise I'm left feeling like I did something wrong or the settings just don't work.

I got AI to tell me to drop this in my .zshrc config: echo -ne '\e[1 q - which I got to mostly work when fiddling with various options, but I ended up disabling that in favor of the pure ghostty config.

I'd like to ideally go back to a 0 config ghostty setup if what I need to do is configure my .zshrc config correctly, but then again that is also shell specific, so having the editor do it for me is kind of nice too.

As my closing thoughts, I'm not super versed in shell configuration, so there may be some assumptions being made here about shell config that I'm not used to (as pretty much only ever being in iterm2 user on mac.)

[00-kat]

The shell integration sets the cursor to a blinking bar in vi insert mode, a box in normal mode, etc.

Disabling the cursor part of the shell integration disables this and only this.

So yes, the configuration you have is indeed what you want:

cursor-style = block
cursor-style-blink = false
shell-integration-features = no-cursor

[thiagowfx]

s/box/block

[nickzelei]

The shell integration sets the cursor to a blinking bar in vi insert mode, a box in normal mode, etc.

Disabling the cursor part of the shell integration disables this and only this.

So yes, the configuration you have is indeed what you want:

cursor-style = box
cursor-style-blink = false
shell-integration-features = no-cursor

The cursor-style only works though when shell-integration-features = no-cursor is present.
I'm not using vi or anything (unless I'm midunderstanding what you mean here, but I just open the terminal and am testing out how the cursor looks).

Also changing the shell-integration-features seems to require a full restart of ghostty instead of just reloading the configuration (maybe this is intended). But with the no-cursor disabled, I can freely change the cursor-style and with a config reload it updates as expected.

[00-kat]

seems to require a full restart of ghostty

It injects code into your shell. You can't uninject code without restarting ghostty or restarting your shell then sourcing the shell integration code again.

I'm not using vi or anything (unless I'm midunderstanding what you mean here)

You're not; I'm just saying why it does that.

s/box/block

Oops, fixed.

[b11e]

The shell integration sets the cursor to a blinking bar in vi insert mode, a box in normal mode, etc.
Disabling the cursor part of the shell integration disables this and only this.
So yes, the configuration you have is indeed what you want:

cursor-style = box
cursor-style-blink = false
shell-integration-features = no-cursor

The cursor-style only works though when shell-integration-features = no-cursor is present. I'm not using vi or anything (unless I'm midunderstanding what you mean here, but I just open the terminal and am testing out how the cursor looks).

Also changing the shell-integration-features seems to require a full restart of ghostty instead of just reloading the configuration (maybe this is intended). But with the no-cursor disabled, I can freely change the cursor-style and with a config reload it updates as expected.

EDIT: i forgot to kill tmux-server and then restart 🤦‍♂️

Does this stick?
I applied this and it only worked temporarily. Starts to blink again randomly.
Now I reload the config and restart ghostty and it blinks even though I have these in my config.

[Elmer-Almeida]

thank you!

[diego898]

Just to make sure I understand - you cannot have a block cursor if shell integration is present? (on macos)

[00-kat]

You can—you just need to disable that specific shell-integration feature as follows:

shell-integration-features = no-cursor

[diego898]

Oh I'm sorry I misunderstood - thank you!

[magnusriga]

@00-kat Apologies for beating a dead horse here, but is there any way to maintain the ZSH vi-mode behavior of a line-style cursor in Insert mode, and a box-style cursor in Normal mode, while also removing the blinking?

Setting shell-integration-features = no-cursor leaves me with a box-style cursor in both Insert and Normal mode. With this setup, I can turn off the blinking with cursor-style-blink = false, thus solving the original problem, but introducing a larger one.

Setting shell-integration-features = cursor will give me a line-style cursor in Insert mode, and a box-style cursor in Normal mode, as expected, but with this setup I am unable to turn off the blinking. cursor-style-blink = false has no effect, as pointed out by other commenters.

Any and all help appreciated.

[00-kat]

I only know how to do that for Bash and Fish, sorry. I believe you did find #2812 (comment) to work though.

[magnusriga]

@00-kat Yep, thank you. Ended up re-writing it as seen in the last post, works well now. Had to manually set shell integrations variables, e.g. export GHOSTTY_SHELL_INTEGRATION_NO_CURSOR=1, over ssh, but that might be fixed later if the team decides to make a new ssh command with automatic shell integration.