I tried all of these css. I added them as snippets. That didn’t work. Then, I added them to the end of the obsdidian.css and that did not work either. Is this not working with 1.0?
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You can use a plugin to get cursor options. It doesn’t hide the system cursor that Obsidian is using, and it’s buggy but you may find it useful. You can use a css snippet to style it. I’ll add an example.
/* iAWriter-ish style. The cursor colour in a light theme */
.theme-light .x-cursor {
opacity: 1;
background: #00bbff;
width: 4px;
left: -1px;
top: -2px;
height: calc(6px + var(--cursor-height));
transition: opacity;
top: calc( -6px - var(--header-height));
}
/* iAWriter-ish style. The cursor colour in a dark theme */
.theme-dark .x-cursor {
opacity: 1;
background: #2c95b4;
width: 4px;
left: -1px;
top: -2px;
height: calc(6px + var(--cursor-height));
transition: opacity;
top: calc( -6px - var(--header-height));
}
/* Disable movement effect */
.cursorWrapper .x-cursor::after {
display: none;
}
/* Blinking */
.cursorWrapper .x-cursor0,
.cursorWrapper .x-cursor1 {
animation: blink1 1s 0s both infinite;
}
/*
@keyframes blink1 {
0% {
opacity: 1;
}
45% {
opacity: 1;
}
50% {
opacity: 0.2;
}
95% {
opacity: 0;
}
100% {
opacity: 0.2;
}
}
*/
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In the terminals of yore — think cathodic ray tubes —, the cursor display and blinking was handled in hardware. It isn’t the case any more since many, many years. It’s now handled entirely in software. As far as I know, the Obsidian cursor is not handled by Obsidian itself but by the underlying editor framework, namely CodeMirror. It’s CodeMirror who made a design decision, while issuing version 6, that the cursor wouldn’t be controllable by CSS any more. I remember having read somewhere in release notes that this was supposed to spare some computing resources for editing and displaying text, thus also extending battery life on laptops and mobile devices. How many minutes of battery life you gain and whether it’s worth the price paid in visibility remains to be proven. But it may well be true that something is gained in responsiveness on some machines.
As someone who has to wear glasses to work with a display or read a book, I’m firmly in the camp of those who feel that too much was lost in commodity. Ninja Cursor, however imperfect, is a godsend for me.
4 Likes
Thanks all. I’ll check this out.
I looked into this a little bit, and as far as I can tell there’s no elegant way to set the cursor width, but it’s pretty easy to change the cursor color.
If you don’t have one already, add a custom css file in your snippets folder.
{my-vault-directory}/.obsidian/snippets/custom.css
Add the following code
body.fancy-cursor .markdown-source-view.mod-cm6 .cm-content,
body .markdown-source-view.mod-cm6 .cm-content,
body.fancy-cursor .mod-cm6 .cm-line {
caret-color: var(--text-accent);
}
var(--text-accent) is whatever you chose in settings for Appearance > Accent Color. You can also hard-code that color, for example
caret-color: red;
Then, at the very bottom of Settings > Appearance, make sure your custom snippet is toggled on. That should do it!
There is actually a property called caret-shape, but it’s not yet supported, so we’ll just have to wait for that one.
BONUS
If you’re like me and you like the default theme with the exception of the very big heading tags (h1, h2, etc.) you can add the following to that same custom css file to tone those down a bit:
body {
--h1-size:1.125em;
--h2-size:1.115em;
--h3-size:1.105em;
--h4-size:1.005em;
--h5-size:1em;
--h6-size:0.95em;
}
3 Likes
I used TRU’s ninja-cursor plugin.
/* iAWriter-ish style. The cursor colour in a light theme */
.theme-light .x-cursor {
opacity: 1;
background: #00bbff;
width: 3px;
left: -1px;
top: 5px;
height: calc(13px + var(--cursor-height));
transition: opacity;
top: calc( -6px - var(--header-height));
}
/* iAWriter-ish style. The cursor colour in a dark theme */
.theme-dark .x-cursor {
opacity: 1;
background: #2c95b4;
width: 3px;
left: -1px;
top: 5px;
height: calc(13px + var(--cursor-height));
transition: opacity;
top: calc( -6px - var(--header-height));
}
/* Disable movement effect */
.cursorWrapper .x-cursor::after {
display: none;
}
/* Blinking */
.cursorWrapper .x-cursor0,
.cursorWrapper .x-cursor1 {
animation: blink1 1s 0s both infinite;
}
@keyframes blink1 {
0% {
opacity: 1;
}
50% {
opacity: 1;
}
74% {
opacity: 0;
}
100% {
opacity: 0;
}
}
1 Like
Thanks, this is excellent.
This is my current CSS. Adding back the cursor blink with a 2 second delay after typing stops before the blinking resumes. The delay gives me time to think. The blinking is impatiently waiting for more words. Helps me with longform writing.
/* iAWriter-ish style. The cursor colour in a light theme */
.theme-light .x-cursor {
opacity: 1;
background: #00bbff;
width: 4px;
left: -1px;
top: -2px;
height: calc(6px + var(--cursor-height));
transition: opacity;
top: calc( -6px - var(--header-height));
}
/* iAWriter-ish style. The cursor colour in a dark theme */
.theme-dark .x-cursor {
opacity: 1;
background: #2c95b4;
width: 4px;
left: -1px;
top: -2px;
height: calc(6px + var(--cursor-height));
transition: opacity;
top: calc( -6px - var(--header-height));
}
.cm-editor * {
caret-color: transparent !important;
}
/* Disable movement effect */
.cursorWrapper .x-cursor::after {
display: none;
}
/* Blinking */
.cursorWrapper .x-cursor0,
.cursorWrapper .x-cursor1 {
animation: blink1 1s 0s both infinite;
animation-delay: 2s;
}
@keyframes blink1 {
0% {
opacity: 1;
}
45% {
opacity: 1;
}
50% {
opacity: 0.2;
}
65% {
opacity: 0;
}
95% {
opacity: 0;
}
100% {
opacity: 0.2;
}
}
2 Likes
I noticed that on iOS, the regular cursor keeps blinking ‘behind’ the new, non-blinking (in my setup), thicker one. Only on iOS, not on desktop. This seems strange.
The Ninja Cursor tweak works great, thank you! However, it is strange to me that an app that is all about writing doesn’t have a proper, easily noticeable and customizable cursor by default.
2 Likes
The Ninja Cursor animation does eat up quite a bit of CPU though, so I disabled it… I think a bigger colorful static cursor is still more noticeable than the default blinking one.
Also just noticed the cursor doesn’t move along when headings jump to the right showing the hash symbols, when you use the mouse to place the cursor. Really wish there was a less hacky way to do this :-/
Where are you putting these styles? It has no impact when I add it to custom.css (but other styles in that file appear to be working).
1 Like
Hello. Thanks to you, I got acquainted with the plugin for the cursor, and a special thanks for the code for setting it up.
Tell me, is it possible to somehow change the code so that the wide cursor does not overlap the letter, but looks like in the screenshot that I attached? I am very far from the code, and yesterday I searched for 2 hours on this forum, reddit, and even in the css tutorial how to do this, but i couldn’t do it the way i want.
Thank you very much in advance if you can answer me.
Maybe try it with the default theme, and turn off other snippets as a test.
This is what mine looks like. Using minimal theme. Sometimes I use default theme. On the second image, selecting text, I see a little bit of overlap. I’m using 4px for cursor width. My font size is 20. My zoom level is 100%. If you are making the cursor wider and the font is smaller you would probably get more overlap. So increasing the font size would help.
Here is what it looks like when I change the width to 8px, so I guess making a block width doesn’t work great. At least it’s not a single pixel wide.
That’s cool. Over all this is kind of a hackish way to get a bigger/brighter cursor. Might not be worth it for everyone.
Hello. What you show in the screenshots is exactly what I’m trying to solve - I’m trying to make a more visible and wider cursor that doesn’t overlap the text.
I saw a guy’s theme where the cursor looks like this, but I don’t like the theme at all (and I don’t know how to find his theme) and I also use the minimal theme.
In my searches, I even got to a site with css guides (the guy above gave a link to it) and tried to embed code from them into the code you cited above, but nothing happened (as I already wrote, I don’t know how to code).
Formally, what I’m trying to achieve is a block cursor like in the screenshot (a wide, visible one that highlights the whole character and doesn’t overlap it).
The only thing I found close to what I want is your plugin and your code described here. And I agree - it’s a hell of a lot of effort for such a banal but necessary feature )) Thanks again for the plugin and help, by the way, you’re cool!
However, now that we seem to understand each other quite well. Is it possible to do what I want with your plugin, or should I give up and hope that one day the obsidian developers will introduce such a feature themselves? Logically, if such a solution is sewn into one of the themes, it should be realizable right?
If you give me a direction where to look or even help with such a code, I would be just happy!
To clarify, that’s not my plugin or my code. I just use the plugin this way.
But to answer your question I don’t believe caret-shape is recognized yet. Someone else mentioned this above. Hopefully in an update.
For now you can try this. Make as wide as you need. Use an rgb color picker to find the color you want, keep the a value at 0.5. The RGB numbers are for the color and A is the alpha channel (opacity).
You might have to change left from -1px to something else to adjust the offset. Here is what mine looked like when messing around with it.
background: rgba(78, 163, 191, 0.5);
width: 14px;
left: -1px;
1 Like
Indeed, something I got confused with this, the creator of the ninja cursor - vorotamoroz.
In any case, you helped me make everything exactly the way I wanted. Thank you very much!
I asked for help in the CodeMirror forum (Making the (text) cursor more noticeable - discuss.CodeMirror) and apparently this should be easy to do in CodeMirror. But, I guess Obsidian just blocks the CSS or something? (Sorry, I don’t really know much about CSS…) If so, shouldn’t it be easy to just enable access to the element?
Also… why is this thread tagged “editor-legacy”, when this problem concerns the new editor? I don’t think you can call modifying cursor style a legacy feature.