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August 22

stop cursor blink on all apps in windows 11, especially Geany

Hi, I want to know how to stop the cursor blinking across all of Windows 11. I have disabled blink in Settings, but some apps still blink, and I can't fix it. The worst case is Geany, my otherwise excellent text editor. Any suggestions? IBE (talk) 00:12, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oh hey that's based on Scintilla, I use SciTE myself.

Geany sets its own blink rate. There is some confusing discussion about how Scintilla GTK (which is what Geany is?) respects a setting for GTK blink rate "if available". On Windows, I guess it isn't.

There's a cursor width setting in the Geany manual, which in theory will turn the cursor off entirely if set to 0. You might be satisfied with that, if it works. Card Zero (talk) 14:31, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This is hard, from a programmer's point of view.

The blink setting in Windows affects the text inputs rendered by Windows' toolkit. All applications that have outsourced their text inputs to Windows' toolkit automatically follow this setting. But Windows' toolkit is only available on Windows, so if you want to create a cross-platform application (like Geany), you can (A) maintain two versions, one with Windows' toolkit, one without; (B) use a cross-platform toolkit; (C) build your own text inputs. (A) is a lot of work, as you have to maintain two versions of every graphical input/output function. Geany uses (B), in the form of the GTK toolkit. I suppose GTK's developers may try to read Windows' settings, but the interface to Windows' settings is a poorly documented moving target.

There may be a tool on Windows to configure GTK. I haven't used Windows in ages, so I never tried this myself. That may help for the GTK-based applications, but not everything else. Some applications could have hard-coded blinking, so no way to change it. PiusImpavidus (talk) 08:25, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Well, in this case, poorly documented moving target is undue. It's GetCaretBlinkTime(), and that was true in 1996, which is the age of my copy of WIN32.HLP, and it's still true today. I just tried, it returned 530 milliseconds. Microsoft's online (web) help closely follows WIN32.HLP, if you can find your way into the right parts of it. (Reading an actual .hlp file in 2024 is not so simple, I must admit, since they removed the reader years ago.) I'd imagine that every Windows GTK-based application ships with its own copy of GTK, rather than attempting to use or install system-wide shared libraries. For instance I see my GIMP has a libgtk-win32-2.0-0.dll, hidden among a million other dlls, in its \bin alongside the application binary. So a system configuration for GTK on Windows is probably not an option. Card Zero (talk) 11:03, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for those replies. Looks like I'll have to keep searching to see if there's a way around it. Sad because when I had it on Windows 10, it was all good for some reason, easy to disable the blink (I'm pretty sure there was a setting under Edit->Preferences). IBE (talk) 00:08, 24 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]