28.4.3.7 Cursor Parameters

This frame parameter controls the way the cursor looks.

cursor-type

How to display the cursor. Legitimate values are:

box

Display a filled box. (This is the default.)

hollow

Display a hollow box.

nil

Don’t display a cursor.

bar

Display a vertical bar between characters.

(bar . width)

Display a vertical bar width pixels wide between characters.

hbar

Display a horizontal bar.

(hbar . height)

Display a horizontal bar height pixels high.

The cursor-type frame parameter may be overridden by the variables cursor-type and cursor-in-non-selected-windows:

Variable: cursor-type

This buffer-local variable controls how the cursor looks in a selected window showing the buffer. If its value is t, that means to use the cursor specified by the cursor-type frame parameter. Otherwise, the value should be one of the cursor types listed above, and it overrides the cursor-type frame parameter.

User Option: cursor-in-non-selected-windows

This buffer-local variable controls how the cursor looks in a window that is not selected. It supports the same values as the cursor-type frame parameter; also, nil means don’t display a cursor in nonselected windows, and t (the default) means use a standard modification of the usual cursor type (solid box becomes hollow box, and bar becomes a narrower bar).

User Option: x-stretch-cursor

This variable controls the width of the block cursor displayed on extra-wide glyphs such as a tab or a stretch of white space. By default, the block cursor is only as wide as the font’s default character, and will not cover all of the width of the glyph under it if that glyph is extra-wide. A non-nil value of this variable means draw the block cursor as wide as the glyph under it. The default value is nil.

This variable has no effect on text-mode frames, since the text-mode cursor is drawn by the terminal out of Emacs’s control.

User Option: blink-cursor-alist

This variable specifies how to blink the cursor. Each element has the form (on-state . off-state). Whenever the cursor type equals on-state (comparing using equal), the corresponding off-state specifies what the cursor looks like when it blinks off. Both on-state and off-state should be suitable values for the cursor-type frame parameter.

There are various defaults for how to blink each type of cursor, if the type is not mentioned as an on-state here. Changes in this variable do not take effect immediately, only when you specify the cursor-type frame parameter.