I’m currently setting up my new Laptop with Ubuntu Natty. Apart from all the things I hate in Unity (the list is long), there’s one recurring annoyance: the blinking cursor in Gnome Terminal. There’s no menu setting to disable it, but fortunately, there’s still a way to fix it.

You can configure a lot in Gnome using the gconf configuration system. For all settings that aren’t available through the menus, you can use the graphical gconf-editor tool or the command line utility gconftool-2.

There are two gconf settings: A desktop-wide one that disables cursor blinking for all Gnome applications (/desktop/gnome/interface/cursor_blink). And the other is a setting specific to a Gnome Terminal profile (/apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/cursor_blink_mode for the “Default” profile). While the desktop-wide one is a boolean setting, Gnome Terminal allows to either inherit the desktop-wide setting (“system”) or to set your preference explicitly (“on”, “off”).

This command disables cursor blinking desktop-wide:

  gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/interface/cursor_blink --type bool false

And this command disables blinking just for Gnome Terminal’s Default profile:

  gconftool-2 --set /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/cursor_blink_mode --type string off

All changes to the gconf database are persistent, so you don’t have to run these commands in every session.