This is a deal breaker issue for me as I am used to writing long form texts without any movement on my screen. And the blinking cursor is incredibly distracting.
Proposed solution
Allow users to set a setting to stop the cursor from blinking.
I agree this cursor situation sucks. The change should have been an optional toggle. For a dedicated writing application with extensive customizability this is a step backwards on desktop.
Is there a way to change cursor settings at the operating system level (since Obsidian is now using the native cursor)? For example, Mac and iOS have a “reduce animations” setting in Accessibility (I don’t know if it stops cursors from blinking, but it’s an example of the sort of thing you might look for).
I looked into it but there is none I could find. There is one that supposed to work on NSText inputs which Obsidian doesn’t use. So no, there is no way to get around this blinking cursor currently.
@nikivi thanks a lot for your explanation.
So this means I can’t change a thing in regarding to cursor style settings via css snippets?
I spent numerous hours going through the obsidian forum to find a solution for at least a minor change that’d work but nothing changed the cursor style.
Nevermind, I figured it out. Somehow Electron doesn’t seem to respect what’s in gsettings (probably due to Obsidian running under Xwayland on my system for now) and just uses $XDG_CONFIG_DIR/gtk-3.0/settings.ini instead, where you can put this line anywhere under [Settings]:
Caret blinking can stop me from focusing when I’m trying to write something, and this is made worse by the fact that selecting text does not even hide the caret like it does in other applications.
I want blink in other applications, so I can’t turn it off system-wide, but in Obsidian the caret blinking is obnoxious and attention-demanding and stops me from properly focusing on the actual text.
Right now, I can enable the “legacy” editor and use this CSS snippet:
but this likely won’t work in future updates when the “legacy” editor is removed.
Not like I’m going to update Obsidian until I’m sure that future versions will have the accessibility features I need, but it would be a shame for this to be the deal breaker.
If the native caret can’t be controlled at all then please at least provide a setting to turn it off and add back an artificial caret that can be controlled by CSS.
